Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

cacm.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 240 posts

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#201

Post by eru »

smokel wrote: post #154
TeMPOraL wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think this one would be any different? Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life , in a direct and apparent way.

No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with. Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.

Microsoft Excel (or cloud-based spreadsheets) will always be allowed. Even if they remove scripting abilities, a clever person can remove a lot of office busy work with just basic Excel functionalities like pivot tables.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#202

Post by eru »

bee_rider wrote: post #133
oytis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching people a scripting language when the language has been already chosen for them, platform has been prepared, data preformatted etc. might be easy - a non-trivial share of my classmates couldn't comprehend a for loop though. To have real transferrable programming skill - I am not talking about one that will get you a software engineering job, just basic problem solving - you need to know an awful lot about how…

It might be the case that a better language for this sort of thing would have to be designed. Maybe somebody needs to take another crack at the sort of Visual Basic/Excel type environment. I think someone on this site chimes in occasionally with a sort of “spreadsheet, but each cell runs a line of Python” type program they’ve been working on (although I can’t remember the name unfortunately). That could be a good bas…

Spreadsheets might already be that better environment. You can solve a load of spreadsheets with some smarts and just spreadsheets (no Visual Basic or so necessary).

But that doesn't mean _teaching_ people how to solve problems is any easier.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#203

Post by fomine3 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #174
glandium wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.

Anyone who trusts computers to do non-integer math correctly does not know anything about floating point numbers.

I trust, but they compute in a different form of numbers

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#204

Post by skydhash »

depressedpanda wrote: post #91
karmakaze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what I had in mind as I wrote it. Sad that many macOS apps now are built with Electron, or we simply use web browsers to access public or internal apps.

Using web browsers to access apps is actually a boon in this regard: the whole UI is exposed via the DOM, and you can use JavaScript to interact with it for macros -- and it's cross platform as it works on any OS that can run a web browser! In contrast Automator/AppleScript only works on macOS afaict.

But then you got the ugliest DOM. I left FaceBook because I was trying to curate my friends list (2k+) down to only the person I know in the real world. But the Unfriend process was a dark pattern and automating it was more work than it was worth. Instagram was worse.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#205

Post by waterheater »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #172
waterheater wrote: post #2

This fragmentation was predicted well over a decade ago, but we're finally seeing mass market realization of these predictions. The most relevant idea here is Koomey's Law [1], which postulates that the "number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years." This law is essentially a combination of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling. As transistors get smaller, Moore's Law predicts increa…

> However, Dennard scaling also says that the power density of a transistor remains constant. As transistors became smaller, more of the die became occupied by transistors, causing more heat dissipation per unit area. After exhausting cooling options (think back to the TDP of those CPUs back in the late-90s/early 2000s), Dennard scaling died in the mid-to-late 2000s because of thermal issues. Dennard scaling says tha…

Good point. Leakage current is the main issue these days, but that problem is only indirectly linked to power density.

I've explained it your way in the past, but I saw the Wikipedia article for Dennard scaling [1] says that power density for a transistor remains constant with time, which is true given that the underlying transistor technology has constant resistive losses. My understanding is that transistors using GaN have higher power density than "traditional" transistors, which mean Dennard scaling certainly breaks down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#206

Post by fsflover »

JohnFen wrote: post #159
seydor wrote: post #51

ditch your phone , go back to your desktop, problem solve. Mobile has been a regression in pretty much everything except corporate profits. The focus of the article is wrong. PCs for example are not getting more specialized, they are getting new capabilities with the additional specialized gpus. As others have said the problem does not lie in processors, but on the software and UI, which has been steadily dumbing dow…

I agree -- this is exactly why when my current smartphone dies, I'm going to be switching to the dumbest phone I can find and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it.

> and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it

So why wouldn't you buy Librem 5 or Pinephone, which are pocket computers running GNU/Linux which have a phone functionality?

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#207

Post by rtz121 »

omscs99 wrote: post #56
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off Seems to me like you’re assuming that…

> Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off

The only reward I need for automating a tedious task is my own sanity.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#208

Post by namaria »

bee_rider wrote: post #13
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

When every workflow and every bit of data passes through computers (even if, as often in German bureaucracy, just to be printed out and filed) everyone is a programmer. Living in denial and programming ad hoc, non specified, untested, programs in very indirect and flawed ways is much worse then just teaching everyone basics of computing.

Computers are vital and unavoidable technology. Once it was arcane knowledge to read and write, to make calculations. It will be trivial in the future to know the basics of computer science and scripting.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#209

Post by namaria »

eru wrote: post #199
bee_rider wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard. And most people can do basic arithmetic, right? The goal, I think, to start should be to get to the point where an office of 10 or so people has at least one or two who can string together basic scripts.

> Literacy rates in the US are pretty high I think, compared to where we were before k-12 schooling became standard. 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc By and large, kids from well-off parents were always more literate, and they still are. And the US is a lot richer now than it used to be.

So your reasoning is "elites have always been more educated then average, so standard education cannot have had an effect in average literacy"? It is far more reasonable (and verifiable) to conclude that widespread standard education is more than just correlated with higher average rates of literacy.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#210

Post by namaria »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #49
NikolaNovak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say that - I'm increasingly subscribing to "bullshit jobs" theory : * productivity for goods is high and availability is high (we can discuss inequality and distribution) * we just don't need everybody to work 40hrs a week to obtain collectively good standard of living * but as a society we are uncomfortable with universal basic income * so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary j…

> so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary jobs. Your first 3 bullet points make sense, but this last one is where I think the normal theory behind "bullshit jobs" really falls apart. Every individual business has a large, strong economic incentive to not hire these bullshit jobs if they don't need to, so why should we think they would be so generous to engage in this "bullshit jobs charity"? I…

You're conflating the internal (lack of) logic from the perspective of the person employed in a bullshit job with the external logic for the existence of this position. Businesses hire people for multitude economically sound reasons and very often from the perspective of the person the job is utterly meaningless except for providing them with a paycheck. That leads to psychic pain. The economic logic is there and moving the needle but the social, cultural, psychological logic is lacking. That is the problem. I think the theory is sound: that disconnect between economic logic and other levels of meaning is at the source of the problem. There's no grounds to dismiss it by reducing all logic to economic logic.
Post reply on HN