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Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

manu.zone

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Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#121

Post by wizofaus »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #114
huimang wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-". The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greates…

This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/ understood what I understand . Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's…

> nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice

I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#122

Post by rurp »

politician wrote: post #65
Ensorceled wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science a…

This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilizati…

If modern society collapses, starting back over with the same approach isn't the best plan. Cheap hydrocarbons are sort of like VC funding. They have allowed society to advance extremely rapidly, in a totally unsustainable way. We have yet to find out if we can stick the landing on transitioning to a sustainable lifestyle. It's possible that humans just aren't wired in a way to responsibly manage the risks introduced by sufficiently advanced technology, at least not at the current rate of change.

In a post-apocalyptic world, survivors should really be rethinking the approach that brought that about. Avoiding the cheap hydrocarbon consumption phase might result in a much longer lasting civilazation next time around.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#123

Post by wizofaus »

msla wrote: post #90
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #27

> How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless…

It isn't just the lack of a piece of paper, it's the fact every project is new to some extent (to exactly the extent we can't just reuse existing code) and present somewhat new challenges. Also, some difficulties scale very nonlinearly, with single changes turning the challenge from needing a few extra weeks to solve to being effectively insoluble in any reasonable timeframe, if ever. ("Check this program to see if o…

Has anyone ever written a piece of code that's really so difficult for a human to read and figure out whether it halts? Obviously it's not hard to imagine theoretical examples of a program so large nobody could figure it out within a human lifetime, but I'm not entirely convinced for real programs written by humans that checking for haltability is likely to be harder than checking for following coding standards (unless your coding standards consist purely of such narrowly and explicitly defined rules that it's 100% automatable). Just because a single algorithm that works for all possible programs can't exist doesn't mean that it's necessarily difficult for any (or even most) actual programs humans might write.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#124

Post by quickthrower2 »

wizofaus wrote: post #121
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/ understood what I understand . Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's…

> nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?

I think restarts of home computers are rarely needed even in Windows. On the server we have gone down the cattle not pets route so that restarting is abstracted away. (When was the bare metal restarted on that CDN/VM/ etc.)

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#125

Post by stcroixx »

commandlinefan wrote: post #42
ubermonkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.

That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".

I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#126

Post by quickthrower2 »

mikelevins wrote: post #36
agentultra wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curio…

"My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.

The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#127

Post by Baeocystin »

prometheus76 wrote: post #54
dpkirchner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that matter? A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.

Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The people who were already there were not happy with this influx of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been established. In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and…

And I fully admit I miss the culture of the times, too. We all knew it was destined to be limnal, but it still hurt to see it succumb.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#128

Post by quickthrower2 »

forkerenok wrote: post #32

I haven't read the book, but the quotes do really read as timeless. I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet and still an "internet virgin". One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free software in the next decade? When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it seems a lot of them kicked off around that…

I don’t know but I assume GNU/Linux and the need to complete the OS user space would have driven a wave if such free software.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#129

Post by wizofaus »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #124
wizofaus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?

I think restarts of home computers are rarely needed even in Windows. On the server we have gone down the cattle not pets route so that restarting is abstracted away. (When was the bare metal restarted on that CDN/VM/ etc.)

Had to do it just yesterday when Bluetooth just stopped working, and yes I tried everything else I could think of first. And I do software restarts (iisreset etc) all the time. Mind you I also tried restarting my phone(s) a couple of times recently when it started exhibiting strange behaviour. In neither case did it work - one phone I gave up on entirely (no internet when on cellular data, but it had other issues and had been planning to retire it). The other I had to dig around to find some obscure option ("reading mode") that had been activated somehow.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#130

Post by nuancebydefault »

marcosdumay wrote: post #96
delusional wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.

Has any book-burning movement in history actually succeeded in getting ride of the books? Because I don't know of any, they manage to destroy a text here or there, but there were always some compatible texts that survived. AFAIK, we really didn't lose useful knowledge to them. (And let's not forget that today we made life much harder for the book burners.) What really does destroy knowledge is it becoming useless for…

I would say this is a text-book example of the term survivorship bias (smiley)
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