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

It’s an age of marvels

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 425 posts

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#151

Post by RetroTechie »

goodgoblin wrote: post #78
blacksqr wrote: post #5

Medicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the bubble And the baby with the baboon heart And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby These are the days of miracle and wonder

I also appreciate the marvelous rhythm of the modern world, more miracles per square foot than the life of any saint.

Yeah that's sure to blow past peoples' minds: how many of those marvels there are all around us.

Few everyday objects that did NOT result from a production+logistics chain 100s of nodes long.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#153

Post by ks2048 »

boxed wrote: post #45
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?

What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?

People mention environmental costs. There are also geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the country never really recovered.

Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think the abundance of American supermarkets would still have occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of human rights and wages of people throughout the world.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#155

Post by munchler »

AStrangeMorrow wrote: post #8

I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel at our world.

I do when I'm driving to the airport in the DC area. I imagine that I'm actually picking up Abe Lincoln from the 1860's and what I'll show him on the drive back.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#156

Post by throwaway11460 »

somenameforme wrote: post #117
epiccoleman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys. Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny little devices which pack orders of magnitude more computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The mind boggles.

I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized device with countless exabytes of computational power projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there would…

That's because you have witnessed the decades of exponential growth. It's not hard to extrapolate that growth further, albeit it still blows my own mind when I see a disk that looks like a RAM, is way faster than my RAM was 15 years ago (2 GB/s? You must've forgotten to take your crazy pills), and has 2000 times more storage.

But show it to a guy working with electromechanical or vacuum tube computers and I'm sure it would be a very otherworldly experience for them.

I'm actually not sure what would blow their mind more - a very big and unimaginably fast computer, or a by today's standards very slow computer that fits on few millimeters. Things like payment cards or SIMs are just incredible too - enough compute power to land on the Moon hidden in a piece of plastic.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#157

Post by wumbo »

ghaff wrote: post #140
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so much. People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like. It’s like a running gag that my father complains about supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in Central America, I totally get it.

Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example of something that doesn't ship well.

That’s why they’re the best example.

Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that and a mealy, flavorless storebought

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#158

Post by anonporridge »

bee_rider wrote: post #74
boxed wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?

Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.

There's no intrinsic reason why it can't be.

It entirely depends on how many externalities are created as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around the world. Internalize those externalities and the grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or mitigate them.

The future we should all be striving for is one of extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into hair shirts.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#159

Post by anonporridge »

eleveriven wrote: post #132
nico wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still mind blowing and a huge luxury for most of the world “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson

It's so pity that it is hard to create a future that is truly inclusive and sustainable for all

It is hard, but we've proven to be really fucking good at doing hard things. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#160

Post by tekla »

boxed wrote: post #143
bee_rider wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.

For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place. At least after the market adapts.

The externality of a locally grown blueberry is incredibly higher than industrial farmed blueberries
Post reply on HN