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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

cacm.acm.org

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#171

Post by ethbr1 »

atoav wrote: post #120
dingi wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She doesn't have to tell anyone

Exactly my point. But if you are a manager, you might wanna consider if that is the incentive structure you wanna have at your organization: People who do good work get "punished" with more work, people who keep it low don't. I certainly have left jobs because of that.

I think about incentive structures from an opportunity cost standpoint too.

Everyone has finite amounts of time they can spend on work.

Ceteris paribus, if you spend 90% of your time working and 10% politicking, at most companies you will be out promoted by someone who spends 60% of their time working and 40% politicking.

The parallel IC track that tech popularized solves this to some degree... but most non-tech companies don't have that track.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#172

Post by ZoomerCretin »

waterheater wrote: post #2

This fragmentation was predicted well over a decade ago, but we're finally seeing mass market realization of these predictions. The most relevant idea here is Koomey's Law [1], which postulates that the "number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years." This law is essentially a combination of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling. As transistors get smaller, Moore's Law predicts increa…

> However, Dennard scaling also says that the power density of a transistor remains constant. As transistors became smaller, more of the die became occupied by transistors, causing more heat dissipation per unit area. After exhausting cooling options (think back to the TDP of those CPUs back in the late-90s/early 2000s), Dennard scaling died in the mid-to-late 2000s because of thermal issues.

Dennard scaling says that power usage per transistor per clock cycle is constant; not power density. As transistors became smaller, an x% reduction in transistor area meant an x% reduction in power per transistor per clock cycle, which allowed clock cycles to increase dramatically to consume the same fixed heat dissipation budget.

The breakdown was not from there being too many transistors per square millimeter, but from the breakdown of the direct relationship of transistor size to power consumption per clock cycle due to current leakage. An x% reduction in transistor area no longer causes an x% reduction in power consumption per clock cycle, meaning operating clock frequency is now fixed at your ability to dissipate heat, not your ability to shrink transistors.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#173

Post by ethbr1 »

leephillips wrote: post #166
LtWorf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens to her if her performance is improved?

Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly. This is why it’s bad to be an employee. If you earn a living by knitting scarves in your house and work out a way to make them faster or better, or both, you’ll make more money or have more free time. If you knit scarves for a salary you’ll probably suffer for doing it faster or better.

> Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly.

Not at most modern companies in the real world.

Jobs have already been so hyper-specialized that you have minimal staff "managing" large portions of the company, amortized over a large number of locations / amount of business.

Consequently, if a job task is taken off their plate, there are innumerable additional tasks to backfill the free time.

And critically, tasks that are probably more intellectually fulfilling than the lowest-hanging-fruit rote tasks that are automated.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#174

Post by matheusmoreira »

glandium wrote: post #4
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

Kind of a counterpoint: I've heard countless stories (albeit, in Japan) of people doing things like "manually" doing additions of numbers they already have in a spreadsheet instead of just asking Excel to do the addition in what, two clicks, because they "can't trust the computer to do it right" which sounds like a BS rationalization to justify that they wouldn't have much of a job if the computer was doing it.

Anyone who trusts computers to do non-integer math correctly does not know anything about floating point numbers.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#175

Post by genewitch »

JohnFen wrote: post #159
seydor wrote: post #51

ditch your phone , go back to your desktop, problem solve. Mobile has been a regression in pretty much everything except corporate profits. The focus of the article is wrong. PCs for example are not getting more specialized, they are getting new capabilities with the additional specialized gpus. As others have said the problem does not lie in processors, but on the software and UI, which has been steadily dumbing dow…

I agree -- this is exactly why when my current smartphone dies, I'm going to be switching to the dumbest phone I can find and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it.

and a camera; and a wallet with all the cards you use? maybe the landscape of featurephones is different now, but i only knew of 1 or two (kyocera) that allowed tethering, so now you also have to figure out how to get internet onto your pocket computer - another sim, another bill. Perhaps you need a GPS device too (my car has one built in, but my wife's doesn't, for example).

I was going to just post a link to a picture of my cellphone graveyard drawer; i've been saying this same sentiment for the 12 or so years i've owned a smartphone. I even bought two Nikon 1 cameras to obviate the need for a decent cellphone camera. I have a servicable netbook (eeePC), too.

The most expensive cellphone i ever bought was $300. In theory, i could carry a Nintendo Switch, Nikon 1, feature phone, GPS unit, and a netbook around with me... or this absolute garbage OnePlus that i hate using enough that i only use it when necessary, like to SMS/MMS or something as silly as making or receiving a telephone call.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#176

Post by ethbr1 »

leephillips wrote: post #169
ethbr1 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I stumble across things like this, I always remember this scene from Babylon 5 (and Peter Jurasik's delivery!) (Context: they've found an attache and friend they thought was dead, alive but forgotten in a prison cell) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kCj-Rnd5SsA

That was pretty amazing. I have to watch this show some day.

150% would recommend. I've watched it through 3 times over the years. Can't say that for any other show!

If you do, commit to watching through the end of the second season, before you make a call.

It takes that long for the show to find its feet and the overarching plot to get really going.

And expect a lot of cheesy 90s stuff. Although way less than Star Trek!

But on the whole, IMHO, it's incredibly modern and prescient for when it was released. Far fewer disconnected "monster/problem of the day" than e.g. X-Files, and even those usually still have character interactions that do important world building.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#177

Post by matheusmoreira »

spease wrote: post #130
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

> To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead? Fine. Then write her a script and continue to pay her a salary. Hell, let her keep coming into work if she wants to. Functionally, what’s the difference to the business? Presumably she’s still going to want to maintain social relationships in her life, which means she’s got an intrinsic incentive to do things to benefit someone else even absent financial…

> continue to pay her a salary

Why would any company do that?

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#178

Post by Hgelo »

userinanother wrote: post #158
Hgelo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this take on optimization. She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy. The only reason why I'm as successful as I am is that people understand that I'm so good in optimizing shit that they give me raises. And alone the time I have to myself to skill up instead of waisting it on repetitive things is ridiculous if you think about return of investment and reinvestment.

Many companies don’t even give top performers raises large enough to cover inflation. Who are you kidding here

I get bonuses because my manager knows very well he has much bigger issues when I leave.

You have to have a certain amount of flexibility of course and be willing to quit.

I'm still very sure that good performance is overall much more beneficial than staying and acting at the bottom.

You are hurting yourself while you do mondaine tasks while the other person gets compound interest and new skills.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#179

Post by eichin »

conception wrote: post #34
opportune wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work. I th…

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

Thus, over time, most people working on commercial robots favor increasing the minimum wage :-)

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#180

Post by JohnFen »

genewitch wrote: post #175
JohnFen wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree -- this is exactly why when my current smartphone dies, I'm going to be switching to the dumbest phone I can find and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it.

and a camera; and a wallet with all the cards you use? maybe the landscape of featurephones is different now, but i only knew of 1 or two (kyocera) that allowed tethering, so now you also have to figure out how to get internet onto your pocket computer - another sim, another bill. Perhaps you need a GPS device too (my car has one built in, but my wife's doesn't, for example). I was going to just post a link to a pict…

I realize I'm unusual for the HN demographic, but...

I don't really use the camera on my smartphone, so see no need to replace it. I carry a wallet with the few cards I need daily anyway, so no change there (and even if I didn't need to carry cards, I still need somewhere to keep cash) I don't use my phone to pay for things or access services, so I'm not concerned about doing those things when mobile. I can do what I need to do online from my desktop machine at home.

I do need GPS, but it will be in my pocket computer, so that's fine. I don't need to have online access for this to be useful because I really only use GPS for specific planned activities anyway, so I can preload any maps I might need.

> i only knew of 1 or two (kyocera) that allowed tethering, so now you also have to figure out how to get internet onto your pocket computer - another sim, another bill.

I'm not particularly worried about having the pocket computer be always connected to the internet. I can easily get by without having a constant connection. The pocket computer will have Wifi, which will cover situations where I want to have the machine connect to the internet.

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