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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

#141

Post by ubermonkey »

nonameiguess wrote: post #117
commandlinefan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the rol…

I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen.

I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#142

Post by Tade0 »

Ensorceled wrote: post #37
agentultra wrote: post #28

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? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

> 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…

Unless it's a complete wipeout, there will be plenty of bicycles, solar panels and IKEA knives left - that's a significant leg up in rebuilding civilisation.

Before coal there was wood, before oil there was whaling - when the global population is under 1bln, energy isn't much of an issue.

The wars over it though - that would be the tough part.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#143

Post by ggm »

The wikipedia for Ellen doesn't mention Jeffrey Ullman by name. Is there a reason which people prefer not to refer to, which explains why the coyness, or was it some other computer science Ullman which adopted Ellen? It does state she was raised in a computer science family.

People deserve to stand on their own two legs, and if its "not in the shadow, shines by herself" I can get behind that. Or indeed "no, it's just a coincidence, the adoptive parent isn't Jeffrey and his partner"

(I too was raised in a computer science family, 3 generations now. In my own case, regression tended to the mean but I have high hopes of the next one.)

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#144

Post by [deleted] »

fennecbutt wrote: post #87
agentultra wrote: post #28

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? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way. And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a golden few in the world who are doing _everything_. For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe lik…

[deleted]

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#145

Post by Loughla »

Ensorceled wrote: post #37
agentultra wrote: post #28

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? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

> 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…

Ever read ringworld? Society without access to minerals and fuel resources. Untold technology that the natives have zero capacity to understand or harness. That thought was very engaging for me. Until all the rishing. Then it spiraled.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#146

Post by jonjacky »

manuhortet wrote: post #2

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective…

What other similar books would you recommend?

Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it:

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995)

Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#147

Post by norir »

wl wrote: post #119
norir wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the early christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, the existence of these materials was known from references in orthodox texts but they had been completely lost. Of course we have no i…

The near loss of texts in the Nag Hammadi library and the fragmentary transmission of Parmenides (or Sappho, Thales, Manetho, and countless others, for that matter) is not about book burning. That's playing into ideologically-motivated narratives about knowledge vs. religion and ignores the reality of textual transmission prior to movable type printing making the production of books relatively inexpensive. We've lost…

> The near loss of texts in the Nag Hammadi library and the fragmentary transmission of Parmenides (or Sappho, Thales, Manetho, and countless others, for that matter) is not about book burning.

I can't speak to the reasons for the loss of Parmenides' poem, but scholars seem to think that the Nag Hammadi was indeed buried to prevent their destruction after Athanasius condemned non-canonical sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library.

Regardless, my point is that at least a written text has the chance of being discovered and understood in the future. The arctic code vault is actually interesting in this regard, but decoding it to find the jewels would likely be extremely challenging. There also is a lot of important technical information that isn't on github.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#148

Post by quickthrower2 »

wizofaus wrote: post #129
quickthrower2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bluetooth / general audio may be the annoying exception.

It makes me want to schedule a nightly kill of slack.exe lest it become too attached to it’s worldview of my audio devices.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#149

Post by userbinator »

Ensorceled wrote: post #37
agentultra wrote: post #28

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? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

> 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…

we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons

...and put much of it back into the earth in highly processed form, i.e. plastics in landfill.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#150

Post by psunavy03 »

norir wrote: post #111
marcosdumay wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the early christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, the existence of these materials was known from references in orthodox texts but they had been completely lost. Of course we have no i…

> Most of the early Christian texts were suppressed and destroyed. In the 1940s some ancient texts that had been buried for nearly 2000 years were found in Egypt and not realizing their value, a family member used many of them for kindling.

But they didn't do that because they were trying to destroy heretical thought. They did it because they didn't realize what they had, they were poor, and needed kindling to stay warm or cook food. That's an important difference. Many ancient texts have been lost this way not out of malice, but just because that's what happens throughout the ages.

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