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It's Cold in the Information Age

natalian.org

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Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#81

Post by xxxpupugo »

pbourke wrote: post #9

I really don’t get articles like this. You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. Your cellular phone is more powerful than the time-sharing systems of 25 years ago. There is pervasive wireless broadband internet available in much of the world. Single computers can be bought with dozens of cores and a lake of RAM. You can look up nearly any piece of human knowledge in a few seconds. The labor of…

And that is the problem.

It has hit the plateau. Ideas with value have already been invented. You have hammers powerful than ever, but what are problems you can hit with it? That is the hard part.

Before we are finding more meaningful problems to tackle, keep inventing hammers doesn't make too much of sense, it is just waste of money.

Maybe the future of IT will be to proven its usefulness solving problems that are hard before the revolution of IT, and are still hard after that. Like cheaper/greener energy, reliable/faster transportation, more accessible healthcare and etc.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#82

Post by perl4ever »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #77
oblio wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency. Sorry, but LOL. That's so low on any regulator's agenda that it wouldn't make it even as a campaign point if we were to elect a "president of IT", let alone a real-world senator or mayor or president.

Ok it might not be yet, but things are changing rapidly. In Germany, established parties are running scared right now over loosing first-voters, and push for significant change. Imagine a little icon or traffic sign or so we put on websites informing users about independently measured power effiency. Could work with privacy and network footprint as well. Hell, maybe I should put up a competition for graphic artists t…

Are you saying there's no feedback in the sense that a website that consumes more resources costs more to the owner? I would have thought there is.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#83

Post by xxxpupugo »

povertyworld wrote: post #13

The current crappiness of AR reminds me of the early days of MP3 players. Only a few geeks had them, and it took forever to load an album over the printer port if it didn't crash half way. Then 5 years later, everyone had an iPod.

People long for a MP3 player for listening music anywhere. I don't think AR has demonstrated a comparable use case that is as desirable as this.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#84

Post by trabant00 »

taneq wrote: post #79
trabant00 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. On which you deploy an web app that has 30 working components written in 10 different languages that is able to do a fraction of the work a single vertically scaled server that runs 3 C written components. And has less than two 9 uptime. No one person can grasp it mentally. Is statically linked and must be updated piece by piece, unable to use the dis…

That's because as a sysadmin you can now do work in a week of plugging components together that would have taken three months for a team of five to pull off with C.

Problem is no amount of plugging and configuration on my part can fix problems that come from the complexity of the software architecture.

I can imagine it's a lot cheaper. But what is the compared value/quality? I reckon it's below the slow and steady approach. You are free to argument against.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#85

Post by atoav »

thinkingkong wrote: post #16

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

We as engineers continue to make similar mistakes over and over again, with technological advancement blocking the knowledge transfer between generations. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the generations of engineers, programmers and mathematicians before them.

If “we” see a old Fortran program running some part of an airplane our intuitive reaction isn’t awe and admiration, but we spontaneously decide we can do it better. Some of these old creations run without flaw and yet the first intuition everybody gets is to replace them.

In structural engineering lessons like these had to be learned the hard way: only with collapsing bridges and hundreds of deaths, engineers start to realize that the technical progress in tooling (e.g. computers) didn’t automatically translate to safer and more stable structures and that the stuff they did back in the day is even more impressive looking back considering that.

I am not saying we are doomed: we have a incredible pool of interesting and cool solutions that worked reliably for ages. We just need to do a better job at not fooling ourselves with shiny new toys. We can’t jus assume historically hard problems become a piece of cake if we just throw the latest technology onto it, without even dealing with the lessons learned by the ones before us. This is hubris.

A good analysis of the problem gets you a long way towards the solution, that is why running around with hammers and picturing everything as a nail is already creating problems: machine/deep learning is good at solving some problems, but bad at solving others.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#86

Post by buboard »

oblio wrote: post #75
tannhaeuser wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the workforce in webdev has an average work experience of 5 years or less which leads to self-sustaining generational churn in this area, and a whole industry of bootcamps and fizzbuzz-style questions handed out to employers and webdevs alike. Being hellbent to deliver webapps regardless of fit is no progress, and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

> and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency. Sorry, but LOL. That's so low on any regulator's agenda that it wouldn't make it even as a campaign point if we were to elect a "president of IT", let alone a real-world senator or mayor or president.

I wouldn't rule it out. Considering the occasional tech-related hysterias, all it would take is for someone high profile to start complaining about how much power and heat slack generates.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#87

Post by coldtea »

amelius wrote: post #78
sek wrote: post #73

What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far. Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T. Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! Th…

> Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp. Like with zero customizability?

Hopefully yes.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#88

Post by tannhaeuser »

perl4ever wrote: post #82
tannhaeuser wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok it might not be yet, but things are changing rapidly. In Germany, established parties are running scared right now over loosing first-voters, and push for significant change. Imagine a little icon or traffic sign or so we put on websites informing users about independently measured power effiency. Could work with privacy and network footprint as well. Hell, maybe I should put up a competition for graphic artists t…

Are you saying there's no feedback in the sense that a website that consumes more resources costs more to the owner? I would have thought there is.

I'm afraid I've not completely understood. I was talking about the power consumption for the users of the site/webapp rather than the power necessary for running web servers. But that would indeed be another important measure (and I believe power density is certainly on the radar of data center equipment buyers, but not framework users and most developers yet).

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#89

Post by buboard »

jhanschoo wrote: post #59
buboard wrote: post #51

I love myself some pessimism but tech is not slowing, instead its HN being obsessed with things that don't matter. - VR was a niche from the start, a lot of people were doubtful, and the people that weren't know that it 's not going to work and are already moving on. - javascript frontends are great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the public-facing web doesnt use them, they 're irrelevant to tech's prog…

it's hard to take this comment seriously... > javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them By frequency of retrieval, JS frameworks are the majority of websites served. > kubernetes is relevant to like 100 people on earth Even if it's not k8s, most companies benefit from a container orchestration system. > crypto is entering the plateau of productivity crypt…

> the same services and assurances that banks

Cryptocurrency is meant to replace currencies and central banks, not banks (retail). Banks are institutions built on top of currencies (there are a lot of companies doing that with cryptos btw).

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#90

Post by buboard »

sek wrote: post #73

What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far. Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T. Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! Th…

> is market maturity, this is a very common thing

but the stock market is treating it as if it's still growing

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