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As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

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Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#171

I'm quite excited about technology. I'm not too excited about the sloppy seconds in technology. We seem to substitute performance for convience. For example the whole need for FSR in rendering to just to get playable performance shouldn't be the desired output. It seems like we keep settling for the half ass solution. AAA Games coming onto desktops needing 4090 with DLSS just to be playable at 4k just feels wrong.

Desktop PC gaming may have spelled its own doom with these GPU prices. I have a 11900K, 4070 and 990 Pro but my next system may be one of those handhelds. I tried to get a fair price on a GPU for a very long time. I won’t be doing that again. On needing a 4090, I think the problem is 4K. These games are getting pretty advanced, and 4K is a very large number of pixels. I like it for the additional horizontal real esta…

I rotate parts every other year with a specific component in mind.

GPU / Disk / CPU + Memory so a build configuration rolls into another constantly maintained.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#172
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I'm forty and LLMs are exciting as hell. If we're talking web frameworks, Django was the last good thing and there can never be any more innovation in that sector. In seriousness, though, a technology that lets me do things I couldn't do before is great. A technology that slightly reorganizes my code and makes it so I have to throw everything I have so far away, I'm less excited about. What motivates me…

If you are 40 then you'd have been 33-34 when the "Attention Is All You Need" preprint that laid the foundation for LLMs became available.

Indeed I was.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#173
post #3

Title is misleading. Not getting excited about a new Next.js version doesn't mean you don't care about new technology. Maybe it just means that you don't feel like reorganizing your code or something. Relatively speaking it's still an incremental upgrade to your approach overall. I am 45 and stopped caring much about new web frameworks many years ago. It's not that I don't find them interesting or even advantageous i…

Yea, either you pick the tool that is most suited to the job or pick the tool that you are most productive is. I agree about your sentiment about learning this that are important . I made a natural language network scanner and I got to speak about it at defcon. I never intended for people to find it interesting I just wanted to learn to apply LLMs . The source code is at https://github.com/zitterbewegung/saturday and…

How do you know the tool which is most suited to the job if you never spend time learning new tools? And the tool that you are most productive in suffers from the Innovator's Dilemma - a new tool might make you more productive in the long term but will be a drop in your productivity in the short term; if you switch you'll lose what makes you competitive today, if you don't switch you'll lose out to people who are more competitive than you.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#175
post #166
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demise of NoSQL is greatly exaggerated. It's past it's hype cycle, and that's fine. Many of us use it quietly, to do good work, and there is no need to crow to the world about what is happening under the hood.

My team was asked how we should store data that is variable in structure and depth. When I suggested using mongo and not trying stuff it into a SQL db, I was looked at like I had suggested blending my firstborn for margaritas. People seem to think that NoSQL is dead and was always a bad idea.

The NoSQL movement was absolutely acrid towards SQL. The blowback is justified, IMHO. "blending my firstborn for margaritas" is very colorful language, woah :-)

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#176
post #167
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe offtopic but jQuery still kinda rocks for small proejcts. It's not the fastest nor does it do fancy compile steps to avoid the DOM but instead just provides an easy-to-use API for most common tasks. And as a bonus the documentation is awesome compared to mpst other new-ish JS frameworks.

There’s really no reason to use jQuery at this point. It made sense when the native APIs were lacking and inconsistent between browsers. That’s not the case anymore. Just use vanilla JavaScript.

The big reason to use it now is that there are useful libraries built of top of it, and you already know it.

The value proposition has changed though and there isn't a compelling reason to start using jQuery now, but if you are somebody who just stuck with it this entire time it still works and you are still as productive as you ever were.

And as a bonus you didn't waste any time chasing failed fads along the way...

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#177

There isn't a whole lot of new technology around. Apart from LLMs, everything else is a remix/retread/clone/speed bump with a few tweaks. iOS is 16 years old. Android is a year younger. AWS is a year older. The original Oculus Rift is from 2016. Facebook dates from 2004. Twitter from 2006. Amazon has been around for 30 years. (And looks it.) Starlink is a consumerised reinvention of Iridium (1997). Docker - 2013. Git…

You forgot electric mountain bikes, eMTB's. Maybe not a big thing for everyone, but for the nature-loving nerds at the intersection of computers and mechanics this has personally been the most exciting hobby for the last 5 years. The whole MTB industry is exploding with innovation, just recently Pinion released a motor with integrated gearbox getting rid of the 100-year old derailleur. https://youtu.be/YXmMV1LQu-s?si…

I'm mostly a software person and electric bikes are largely illegal where I live, so I might be biased, but isn't electric bikes just a kind of "incremental improvement"? I mean, I totally agree that it makes the biking experience much better, and those who bike might find the experience revolutionary, but the "technology"... seems to be rather incremental than new.

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mRNA, Crispr-cas9, immune checkpoint inhibitors, etc. Those are novel and at least with Crispr-cas9 one has been so universally recognized as novel that it resulted in the Nobel Prize at a much shorter delay than usual.

Yes! We switched from electronic technology to bio technology.

Where are the biotech equivalents of FAANG?

Re: As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

#179
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now it feels like untangling wires for hours every day. At least we've moved past webpack, that was a bundle of wires that couldn't ever be completely untangled.

What came after Webpack?

I just moved to webpack like a year or so ago. It's so great! What is better? I don't know.
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