131–140 of 144 posts
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
Almost certainly. I can go out into the woods behind my house and get into the iron age in a few days (most of that time would be waiting for clay to dry and charcoal pits to cool). That cuts out ~300k years of anatomically modern human history. Whether or not it would be possible to bootstrap the industrial revolution without easily accessible coal and petroleum is a bigger question. We might lose electricity for a…
Seems pretty optimistic based on the Primitive Technology videos.
This would have been a very smart and useful article up until 3 years ago. Now with AI doing this work is a minute, with most if not all considerations baked in, if some strange quirk would need it. Frameworks and dependencies made and replaced by custom "ground-up" creations is now a plausible reality. Not necessarily useful but doable and most importantly, testable in a fraction of time. We should readjust our sens…
In a same vain, why create functions or classes, when AI can rewrite the code in place and keep track of rules.
I sometimes wonder how much slower technological progression would have been, if we hadn't taken whatever widget engine any given OS gave us, and instead constantly debated over and recreated every feature in the OS, like we do with web interfaces. The crazies part is that when we actually research it, a default button is about 20% faster than the the flat nonsense we've settled on ( https://www.theregister.com/offbe…
Even Hollywood movies show better UIs than modern crap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to me whenever developers say "actually this framework/language/library/platform that's popular and lauded for how accessible it makes development has great performance as long as you dig into the architecture and write code skillfully" because the broad consensus among users is that they will not. As a user, comparitive "performance" is about the code people actually write, and even more on the code…
Actually, Electron is bloated, period. You can do your best with it, but there's a level of fundamental bloat and slow performance that's inherent to how it works. And bad code is bad code. Any platform can be used to write bad code, but the more accessible the development process is for newbie coders or non-coders, the more likely you are to get a lot of poorly performing apps, which is why there were a lot of those…
There are fewer browsers than native GUI environments but we still couldn’t make that work…
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
All of the post-apocalypse LARP scenarios other responses are describing tend to assume at least books and some small number of durable structures survive. If nothing at all makes it, the first thing that happens is most everyone not living on a ground floor dies instantly from falling. Everyone living where it freezes dies in a few hours from exposure. Most people living anywhere experiencing a heat wave die from heat exhaustion in the next day or two. Most everyone else everywhere else dies from starvation or disease in the next few weeks. Even if you're living on a farm, you've got no fences or tools, so you better hope it's a farm with lots of edible plants and it's near harvest season. If you live in a city, you have no hope at all. Even existing food stores will spoil quickly with no containers or refrigeration. The people who do the best will be Hadza and uncontacted tribes and what not that lose their spears and tents, but all they have to do to get back to their prior situation is make more spears and tents, which thankfully doesn't require a global transportation network or modern manufacturing techniques. They're not the ones who know how to build iPhones, though. I'm not sure anyone knows how to build an iPhone, really. The knowledge is probably largely digital. The chief engineer at Apple knows where to look and who to ask, but no single person has all of the knowledge in their own head.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have this odd view that Flash had horrific performance, largely because their encounters with it as users were mostly with ads and graphics on the web that were terribly written and soaked up a lot of CPU. The same is true for tons of Javascript junk that pollutes the web now, but no one blames the language or the interpreter for that. AS3 ran inside a VM, so garbage collection wasn't linked to the browser's n…
It's interesting to me whenever developers say "actually this framework/language/library/platform that's popular and lauded for how accessible it makes development has great performance as long as you dig into the architecture and write code skillfully" because the broad consensus among users is that they will not. As a user, comparitive "performance" is about the code people actually write, and even more on the code…
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
Almost certainly. I can go out into the woods behind my house and get into the iron age in a few days (most of that time would be waiting for clay to dry and charcoal pits to cool). That cuts out ~300k years of anatomically modern human history. Whether or not it would be possible to bootstrap the industrial revolution without easily accessible coal and petroleum is a bigger question. We might lose electricity for a…
Respectfully, this is laughable given the constraints.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything doing server-side work is going to have to be at least somewhat custom. The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of: we're still mostly stuck with the same carved-in-stone widget set from Mosaic, whereas native toolkits were more inventive even in the late 80s. Where's Athena's 2d panner widget, for example? I didn't read any satire in the article at all, it just laid out all the…
>The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of But there is. You'll be so happy to learn about datalist today, https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_d...
It took forever but safari mobile got it right.
Extra fun to be had if you attempt to dynamically update the list.
Conclusion: utter garbage, stay away from it.
I just typed this by hand (lol) in 3-4 minutes:
https://jsfiddle.net/tjc4mpxe/
This is what we are waiting for? This is what is taking so long for browsers to support?
Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?
You probably need to change the thought experiment to get at what you're really trying to get at. If all man-made things disappeared tomorrow, you're talking pipes, wires, streets, houses, antibiotics, the immediate effect is very close to 8 billion people die within a few weeks. The hundred thousandor so survivors may know what they already knew, but now they need to find a way to find each other, write it all down,…
I am not really trying to get to anything except to have fun thinking about how society would organise itself. And since this is not an exam, everyone's free to think through different versions and enjoy the question as they like.
As for me, normally it comes up in a discussion and we develop and make assumptions as we go, but I've prefer to change as little as possible e.g. buildings/infrastructure do disappear but people "land" gently. And then most of what you said would be true: people in inappropriate climates, far away from a source of water or food die. I don't think it makes the thought experiment any less interesting to think about. In fact, the reason I like it is because progress may become so slow that some generations later we'd start believing or question in mythical iPhones and technologies.