Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents • Hacker News Board

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#51

Post by stevezsa8 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

23 years or so of lost knowledge can be regained in the grand scheme of things. But yes, the lack of easy access to coal and oil would be a problem. Maybe the next civilization will be more careful.

That's why I think we should all be trying to help keep society going. I try to do my bit. I just wish the preppers, survivalists, deniers would get involved in their community and try to save it too.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#52

Post by developer93 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

I assume tech moves on so fast that you have to rewrite the course every year. But you do have some certifications which go some of the way, for example the sun certifications for Java.. At least you know the holder will have an idea how it fits together under the hood...

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#53

Post by developer93 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #10

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…

"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)

There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#54

Post by prometheus76 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

dpkirchner wrote: post #24

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…

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 required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos.

A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#55

Post by cassianoleal » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

hotnfresh wrote: post #41

shrubble wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

Some early PCs would boot to a basic environment if it couldn’t boot to any other OS. Not sure if that extended to machines that could run Win3.1, but IBM 8088 PC-XTs (and similar, but that’s what I had) definitely did that, though normally one would boot them to DOS.

MSX would boot to BASIC by default. It was possible to run MSX-DOS instead but not entirely necessary.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#56

Post by arethuza » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

plagiarist wrote: post #48

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…

I would really like to read a novel about future archeologists who rediscover brute force password lists and rainbow tables as they investigate a ruin. Oh, maybe they could be specifically looking for LLM models, LLMs being no longer possible to train due to energy costs.

Only to discover (too late of course) that it was the LLMs that caused the collapse....

(See: AFUtD).

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#57

Post by Random_BSD_Geek » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

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?

"Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#58

Post by huimang » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

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…

"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 greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#59

Post by agentultra » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

stevezsa8 wrote: post #40

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…

That's an interesting question. I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter... But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.

Right, I imagine they wouldn't be seeking out the little grey squares. Humans are curious however and the Wonderer is no different. They might only collect them as they come across them and ponder their meaning and reason for existence in those rare hours they have a little leisure time.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#60

Post by criddell » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 2:39 PM UTC

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…

I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code.

A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.