My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curio…
"My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
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…
Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-})
It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
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…
Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-}) It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.
Oh heck yes. Also a big influence on the video game, Caves of Qud [0] which I also particularly enjoy.
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…
This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilization millions of years in the future.
This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…
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…
> There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do?
They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.
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 greates…
I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see how your way of understanding it is valid without more context.
> 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…
This is why I think that we should resolve the climate change crisis by reducing excess atmospheric carbon by seeding the oceans with iron. Oceanic iron seeding results in plankton blooms that consume atmospheric carbon. When the plankton dies, it accumulates on the seafloor. Over geologic time scales, the accumulated plankton will turn into hydrocarbons, renewing the supply of cheap fuels for a post-human civilizati…
We can't even switch to renewables because that would make some capital owners slightly less money and you're thinking of civilisations millions of years in the future...
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.
>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
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".
Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?