Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ephemeralization

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: Ephemeralization

#71

Post by simonh »

Geekette wrote: post #31

Etymologically speaking, I find the adapted meaning of this term irksome. Given that ephemera is a 16th century word[1] that refers to "transitory written and printed matter" and ephemerality "the quality of existing only briefly"[2], one would expect the standard definition for ephemeralization to be "the process of creating ephemera" or similar, as opposed to "ability of technological advancement to do "more and mo…

I think the definition you refer to in [1] is apt.

"Things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time."

They are used or enjoyed for a short time because the cost or burden of doing so is extremely low. They are cheap, easily accessible, transportable, convenient, disposable. These are the attributes that make them ephemera, and that Fuller saw as ephemeralizing things.

Re: Ephemeralization

#72

Post by hoseja »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #51
mensetmanusman wrote: post #47

Most of the technology I work on wouldn’t be worth doing if the global population hadn’t grown 10x in the last century or so. You need a large mass of people willing to pitch in a penny for an improvement to their lives with expensive technology than a smaller number of enthusiasts. This brings economies of scale and suddenly 1000 things that wouldn’t be worth doing make a new thing that wasn’t predicted. The neo-mal…

Is Malthusianism even believed anymore? The recent statistics I see show the world population slowing down greatly. From what I understand, America and most of the developed world needs more reproduction and immigration if they hope to sustain their economic growth. China raised the one child rule and no one took the bait, citing the same reasons everyone else does- having kids is really expensive and the future of t…

Having kids has been MADE very expensive, culturally.

Re: Ephemeralization

#73

Post by aluket »

beckman466 wrote: post #69
Jensson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very common example of this is people suggesting to remove private profits from the modern economy. It seems like a really good way to cut down waste and save costs in theory, but it never worked in practice if you do it for the whole economy. It does work really well for some problems, but for many others those private profits seems to be a necessary evil for the system to work well. What those people are missing…

> A very common example of this is people suggesting to remove private profits from the modern economy. It seems like a really good way to cut down waste and save costs in theory, but it never worked in practice if you do it for the whole economy. It does work really well for some problems, but for many others those private profits seems to be a necessary evil for the system to work well. > What those people are miss…

Interesting thread on Cybersyn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764727

Re: Ephemeralization

#74

Post by chadcmulligan »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #10

CDs and DVDs are a good example of this. I used to have a wall of my apartment dedicated to media, all completely immaterial now.

Indeed, books to - I always wanted to build a library in my house when I was younger, as the years go by the number of books I have hard copies of gets less and less. Now I just have a bookshelf with reference books, and half of it is empty - everything else on the iPad.

A friend of mine had an entire room dedicated to vinyl LP's, now he has a phone.

It is great that I can carry round a whole library but I used to spend time just fiddling with the books, arranging them, dusting them, taking them out and looking at them. I know I could just build a library, and every now and then I buy some paper copies in a fit of nostalgia, but they just gather dust now. A lot of interests and hobbies are all electronic now.

Re: Ephemeralization

#75

Post by taneq »

bob1029 wrote: post #68
sfink wrote: post #20

This is the sneaky, flawed premise behind many instances of what we call optimization. I have a Law of Optimization: the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. (I imagine someone has named this.) A stronger version would be to say that the distance to optimal is inversely proportional to the externalized cost, so that the total externalized cost goes to…

> the closer you get to optimal on your chosen metrics, the more cost is shifted to unmeasured externalities. This is not inevitable in my experience. You can achieve optimizations that also reduce the dependency on external things. For some of us, this is one of the objectives of optimization. 3rd party dependencies == externalized cost. The real game for me is to solve the problem using correctly-allocated empathy.…

There's still going to be something you're not measuring, and this optimisation process is gonna be making that whatever-it-is worse.

As I'm reading it, the fundamental principle we're talking about here is that there's always a point beyond which optimization is a tradeoff.

Re: Ephemeralization

#76

Post by sfink »

dane-pgp wrote: post #39
sfink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now tell me how you feel about the common phrase "I'll be there momentarily." (I may logically accept that language follows usage, but I just can't not be bothered by that one. Also, people don't seem to like it when I reply "I hope you're right.")

Is it so hard to accept that "momentarily" refers to the period of time before arriving, rather than after arriving? Time is a subject that is hard to avoid using idioms to convey, like when people ask "What time is it?" without specifying what "it" refers to.

> Is it so hard to accept that "momentarily" refers to the period of time before arriving, rather than after arriving?

Yes?

I don't need to make up a different subject for the sentence when it's laid out precisely. If it were "I'll be there briefly", would you still try to contort the words into something like "The time required to get there will pass briefly"?

(Though to argue the other side, "I'll be there shortly" doesn't bother me in the least...)

Re: Ephemeralization

#77

Post by sfink »

shlurpy wrote: post #55
sfink wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theoretical energy expended to move an object tends toward zero, without limit, as the allowed time increases. Which is almost the same thing. (Allowing it to take 12 billion years to move an inch is rather useless, but that's the same issue with the ephemeralization argument in general: it ignores all other measures of "cost".)

There is a hard limit. If you want to get somewhere, you have to get there before the expansion of the universe moves it away forever. Our accessible universe is constantly shrinking. It's a natural law that places firm discontinuities on optimization. This may seem silly, but microcontroller shrinking is running into a similar problem with quantum noose, which is by far the closer boundary. The accelerating expantio…

I really want to call this argument pedantic, but so was mine. And I can't argue against your argument's correctness or validity.

(Well, as far as we know, anyway. Expansion is still the best fitting theory, but there are observable anomalies. Your argument would still win in some other form, perhaps involving Planck Length or similar.)

Post reply on HN