Your guess is not wild at all, and the article implies that (at least until the payment popup shows up)
My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.
Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.
As a kid I used to do that with my family: Grow our own everything.
I'm currently trying to get back to it, until then I try to eat ecological and as much as I can cooked by myself. It is hard though, not everybody can aford a plot of land (ideally next to some decent sized town)
I agree it's not "entitlement" specifically but there's something there. I guess by now everyone has experienced that type of person that "tries to help" by copy/pasting a bunch of AI slop and expecting you to work through the cognitive load of validating it.
The original post sums it pretty well, such big output inherently meant big effort, which was a proxy for good faith. Now that's gone.
Once upon a time there were engineers that used software. Just like any other tool, and usually in combination with electronic, electrical and mechanical equipment, all of them being very well aware of the laws governing it all.
But it was so great as a tool that some engineers didn't want to deal with the burdens and limitations of the physical world, and started focusing on software more and more.
Then the software engineers came, for whom the physical and mathematical aspect of the whole thing was just a distant history lesson (and preferably a problem in someone else's computer).
And after software engineers, the only constant in the entire ordeal will remain: engineering, in a shape or form that very likely nobody can predict right now.
As someone not old but young enough to not have experienced a world before software, Im not sure that engineering rooted in the physical is a necessary prerequisite.
I appreciate your comment but the entire world I happened to experience in my coming of age was at the dawn of the consumer internet. And so “web stuff” was how I cut my teeth. And its my profession. And i never went to school for it, im basically a dumb untrained web dev, borne from the script kiddie days.
There’s a stigma to it sure, but im well past it. All to say I just dont think CS principles down to the physics level is the root and all is an abstraction. Theyre just different things now.
I'm from the times when you had to purchase a separate chip to perform floating point math. It was called a math co-processor. [1]
After a few generations (and over a decade) that was indistinguishable from the CPU chip itself.
It's a long hyperbole, I know, but I think local inference is inevitable; and the big fishes know it.
Will that be a complex technical setup? An appliance? An additional chip in your motherboard? So transparent it's burned right into the CPU? Those are just implementation details. We're probably just one generational breakthrough away from it.
I agree, as I was one of them. Rightfully so, because PHP 20 years ago was the prime example of a complete disaster. Not just occasionally, there were long years of incompatibility, missing implementations, incoherent errors, security issues, fragmentation, etc.
Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6 (after coming from PHP 4). I think it became a more sane ecosystem around very late 7.x to 8.
I won't touch PHP ever again, but I'm glad (no irony) that they finally were able to pull it off. There were some good ideas there, then they quickly became victims of their own success.
Nowadays, there's places (Amazon) where PHP is just forbidden at a company-wide level (not joking) because of their early, long-standing reputation of being a mess. Or places where they just gave up and re-implemented their own PHP (Meta). I don't see that changing any time soon.
If you were there, you'd remember the UTF8/Unicode fiasco (how long it took, how many people was both relying and struggling with it, and how they needed to cover it up after even some hosting providers attempted a beta upgrade and had to roll it back).
There was a PHP 6 (I'm including the non-updates in PHP 5 "waiting" for it), they just had to rewrite history as of PR damage control back then. That's what the article you linked describes, pretty much.
Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.
There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.
The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.
It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Yes. We can complain that technology is "too complicated" but so is the human brain, consciousness, and every other biological system which we have failed to fully understand.
Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.
> It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.
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