Leaving the Physical World • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#21

Post by cb321 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 12:56 PM UTC

fredoralive wrote: post #18

cb321 wrote: post #16

I think this was written in 1994 for this conference https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Mar/64 , but I'm not 100% sure. It refers to "last summer's coup in the Soviet Union" which may also date it. Maybe it should have a (1994) in the title. Or, I don't know, maybe it's from even earlier? Some of the other pieces have nice dates at the bottom, like the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace a bit over 3…

It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".

The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?

EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#22

Post by jdw64 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #15

jdw64 wrote: post #3

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the tox…

> Especially with the advent of AI, it feels like the time I had left to learn and actually build something has run out. Why? Just go build stuff! AI makes an excellent tutor assuming you can exhibit a bit of self awareness and ask directed questions. > yet the seats are strictly limited. Why do you say that? > But I do not possess the skills that the people inside that castle desire and admire. I appreciate the seem…

Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.

However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.

Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.

But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.

So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.

It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#23

Post by akudha » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #3

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the tox…

My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.

We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#24

Post by erikerikson » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

RickJWagner wrote: post #11

“Here, guns were part of the furniture, and my taciturn neighbors used them on one another with heart-breaking regularity. These domestic killers rarely went to jail, since they could usually remind the jury that the deceased, whom most of the jurors knew, needed killing anyway.” It’s enjoyable reading, but I realized the author wasn’t to be taken seriously at this point.

Please explain.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#25

Post by karel-3d » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

cb321 wrote: post #21

fredoralive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the for…

I just put the title to Google and pattern-matched 1998. I am sorry, as I was probably wrong, it seems it's earlier.

edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996

https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...

so you are probably right with 1994

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#26

Post by bpoyner » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

He's describing my great grandmother's childhood in territorial Arizona, down to the riding a horse to a one-room school house. Her family were all tough ranchers living a lifestyle most of us can't really comprehend.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#27

Post by harimau777 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

cb321 wrote: post #21

fredoralive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the for…

That shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't surprise me if people still used the old name even if it isn't technically correct.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#28

Post by Ar-Curunir » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #3

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the tox…

This was beautifully put. Lovely writing, and I agree; the current system is a recipe for anxiety.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#29

Post by justonceokay » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #3

Reading this essay brought tears to my eyes. To me, the physical world is a realm permitted only to those with wealth. The author beautifully romanticizes the evaporation of tangible labor, but the physical labor I actually experienced meant unpaid, stolen wages. It meant working through the night, dozing off on the early morning subway until the very last stop, and enduring endless contempt, humiliation, and the tox…

You don’t have to be privileged to live in the physical world. I quit programming to make candles for years, then apartment maintenance, now in the trades. I make 1/3 what I was making doing digital work, and I’d take a pay cut before returning.

The reasons I had for leaving were manifold, but the big two were wanting to quit Adderall and having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a hard road to live a life in which I want to maximize the /quality/ of my minute-to-minute experience. It involves being very honest with myself about what I want to and don’t want to be doing. I know I want to look at a screen for work like I want a hole in the head.

If you want to jump into the physical world, become a janitor. The work is surprisingly satisfying. You spend all day fixing tangible problems that increase everyone’s quality of life.

Re: Leaving the Physical World

#30

Post by flyinghamster » Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #8

> bytes which no one can chew, architecture no one can inhabit, and software which keeps no cold winter wind from anyone's bodies. this hits hard. hopefully we can start making physical stuff again & teaching kids how to do so.

I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.