Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
FD 40
RT 90
To get a square on the screen. And then I was slightly older boy destroying my dad's precious slides for his presentation by formatting the entire disk accidentally while installing Red Hat Linux 8 Psyche from CDs my dad got at the bazaar. I was so excited for Shrike to come out the next year.
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
Crime rates going down and down. Purchasing power grows everywhere in the world (but we want much nicer things now, so don't feel it). Travel is more accessible that it ever was in humanity history. Information keeps getting more and more accessible.
And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".
Efficiency gains have primarily benefited the capital owners. Workers ability to buy essentials like housing and healthcare have not gotten worse, not better.
I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.
I started reading about the industrial revolutions and the evolution of capitalism recently. And it is my understanding that something similar was happening around the second industrial revolution - normal people barely making a living while owners of massive factories and other "means of production" getting richer rand richer.
That's why communism got so popular in some places and why after capitalism won, it demonized communism so much that people now think those are the only two options and communism is the bad one so capitalism must be the good one.
There are other options like mutualism or market socialism and people (including me until recently) have never heard of them.
Cooperatives exist and most people don't even know what that word means.
We need a system where ownership of both the means of production and more importantly the product goes to the workers. If production is more effective with an assistant ("manager") overseeing them, then can hire one and negotiate his salary collectively. If they need an investment, they can quantify the risk and agree how much the investor gets in return after how long but it should not give the investor a massive chunk of or complete ownership - at most it should give small ownership according to his hourly rate compared to other workers.
Sure consumer goods are cheaper, but I don't need more "stuff". The essentials I need for my family: food, energy, housing, and most importantly time are much less accessible. Sure, we could buy bulk, move to a LCOL area and work remote, but not everyone can do that.
This is the trend that a lot of people in my generation complain about.
This scares me. Humans are getting so domesticated and docile they might soon be content with being pets. I am not sure US independence or French revolution could happen today.
I am obviously not a fan of crime against other peaceful individuals. But crime against an oppressive regime is still crime by that regime's rules.
> But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.
If given a choice I would rather be born in 1940s. 80 years of relative peace, prosperity, cheap education, cheap housing, only single parent needs to work, stronger community network, less overpopulation, better access to doctors, better wealth equality, and you get to partake in the first generation of computers before computers became a method of spying and manipulation of purchasing decisions. Honestly I would much rather be hacking on v6 unix than what I am currently doing.
Would you want to be born a girl in the 1940s? How about as a non white person? And that is assuming you were even born in the US.
Before women had the ability to be professionals earning real money, or access to birth control and many, many other types of healthcare specific to women. Before no fault divorce and before rape within marriage was outlawed?
Decades before the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws still existed?
> better access to doctors
I would take a nurse today over a doctor from the 1940s. The amount of advancement in healthcare between 1940 to today, even just over the counter stuff or information wise from online searches is tremendous.
My grandma was born in the 40s and said it was better back then.
> Decades before the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws still existed?
I don’t live in the USA so that is irrelevant.
Also, keep in mind I still have over half my life to live and the future seems very uncertain. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I would take 1940-2020 which I now know in hindsight was a pretty decent time to live compared to whatever the next 40 years holds. Maybe I am wrong and we will magically cure cancer, solve wealth inequality, 20 hour work weeks due to automation, and stay WW3.
> My grandma was born in the 40s and said it was better back then.
My grandma was also, and she will tell you women should not have as many rights as men. And that periods make women unclean. And kids should have to follow their parents’ religion. And corporal punishment for kids is okay. And daughter in laws should defer to parents’ in laws.
> Maybe I am wrong and we will magically cure cancer
Quality of life after a cancer diagnosis is leaps and bounds better today than it was in decades past. Setting the standard at what I presume is “take this pill and you never have to worry about cancer again” seems like a good way to disappoint yourself.
> Also, keep in mind I still have over half my life to live and the future seems very uncertain.
Things might very well be trending down, but they can still be better than the past in some ways, and worse in some ways.
> Things might very well be trending down, but they can still be better than the past in some ways, and worse in some ways.
Maybe, I would take a guaranteed pretty good 80 years over the next 40-50 years where things are trending downwards. And for all we know, the past 80 years were a fluke caused by WW2 and the carbon impulse happening at the same time.
But when meeting friends, you’d have to agree in advance to a spot and time and wait aimlessly, so many times in the day. Then you’d pick up smoking or reading depending on your character.
If you work most jobs, whether cognitive or manual labor, after some point you can't do them anymore, due to physical and cognitive decline, medical issues, and the plain fact that you can do that shit as a hobby if you really like it, but you shouldn't need to go to some fucking office or greet people in your local Walmart in your late 60s and 70s just to survive.
We call this stopping of work at that point retirement.
Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
Only if your life is so insignificant and your interests and social circle so narrow that your paid gig determines the whole of it and is your sole purpose.
Funny, I also accidentally formatted my dad’s hard drive, destroying work, while trying to install Red Hat, though in my case it was 6.2 “Zoot” somewhere around 1999.
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
People are either proactive or reactive. Proactive think about the system and its incentives and how to align them for everyone's benefit. Reactive people only complain after they have been exploited.
Most people are reactive.
If AI is not a scam, we're gonna see a massive wave of unemployment and only then will many people realize they have spent half of their waking hours making someone else richer and they have no control over what they created.
And I don't meant just those who build AI. I mean everyone whose work isn't mostly manual/physical.
They're OK with open source code being turned into statistical patterns and plagiarized en masse. They will only start complaining once their work has been stolen and they are broke.
>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!
Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.