Nostalgia. It is hard to follow all of the new trends. I feel like I'm becoming obsolete. And now with all of the AI hype, who knows what tomorrow brings.
With past, you know what it was, you have a romanticized image about it. At least I do.
The past holds the roots of the future. I don't think we can shape a rational future without understanding the decisions of the past. Everyone doesn't need to understand the past but some do. It is not nostalgia for me. I study technical developments I didn't live though.
Im not really sure I understand your comment. I wholly admit the quest for rationality maybe driven by desire for comfort and independent of reality. I also often see reality is what one makes of it.
Many topics that people care(d) about are getting more sophisticated and complicated, yet also blander and more homogenized.
So it's much more fun to talk about the different ways, say, 1980s game consoles handled graphics – each had unique chips and unique ideas, but all simple enough to be explained in a single blog post – than it is to talk about how all consoles today use the same hardware and the same software stack to achieve the same mind-bogglingly complicated results that require years of study to understand.
i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.
ii) The fact that the past keeps growing. The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational.
iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour".
These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet.
This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the tech was just just that, tech.
Counter point to this, is that centralized mass media enabled early 20th century fascism and communism to thrive. Hitler's head of propaganda, Goebbels, supplied subsidized radios to the Germans and used it to funnel propaganda into German households at the speed of light. Goebbels had this to say about it:
"It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview"
While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
About how true what is? What has happened on the internet in the past few years that is comparable to Nazi radio control and propaganda?
Maybe the censurious social media apps booting off people with opposing opinions to liberal mainstream in collusion with intelligence agencies actively embedded in their organizations? But that just underscores the dangers of centralization.
I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints. If that be the case, then you would find great solace in the writings of Goebbels.
I for one hold freedom of speech to be sancrosanct, and being a student of history will never waver from its defense.
> it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
I have grown very doubtful about the notion that just having a diversity of viewpoints being expressed serves as a check to those in power, or that it serves to meaningfully inform people.
It increasingly appears to me that the sheer quantity of different viewpoints does the opposite of those things. It generates an ocean of emotional noise that provides cover for those in power to do what they wish, and encourages people to only accept information and views that support the opinions they already have rather than meaningfully informing them.
> I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints
Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place. I'm just saying that it is increasingly looking to me like the internet (especially social media) has managed to remove a lot of the benefits of free speech.
Saying that is far from saying "free speech is bad" or "speech needs to be regulated". It's saying that the mechanisms on the internet appear to amplify emotional or tribal, rather than rational or thought-out, responses. That sort of discourse has very little social upside.
Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
> the sheer quantity of different viewpoints does the opposite of those things
> It generates an ocean of emotional noise that provides cover for those in power to do what they wish, and encourages people to only accept information and views that support the opinions they already have rather than meaningfully informing them.
What you're describing is a balkanization of viewpoints by both consumers and producers rather than a real exposure to a diversity of them. To some extent that has occurred in modern society. It is certainly possible to fully live within your bubble and never be exposed to earnest criticism of your worldview. This trend, of course, pre-dates social media by many centuries.
Prior to the printing press and mass literacy, people would only ever be exposed to opinions within their immediate vicinity (and you would almost certainly never hear the opinions of ancient dead people such as Socrates or Locke). Even still, after those proliferated, there was quite a bit of friction and most people have always defaulted to adoption of local norms or customs without a second thought about correctness.
Mass communications such as TV and radio (along with nationally syndicated newspapers) enabled a handful of companies to gather an immense amount of control over the national conversation. They could almost mold an outcome in a presidential election on the basis of what questions they posed at a debate and how they made the candidates look on camera and what headlines they ran. From a certain perspective, it may have appeared as if the media was rather neutral. But the mass media itself became an embedded fixture of Washington and all the other major power structures that exist within the country. How could the media both act as an agent of common people and maintain a tight relationship with powerful insiders to get exclusive scoops and invitations to social functions? The internet enabled a critique of the media at the same scale as the media itself, in addition to those in power. A viral critique of ABC, NBC, Fox or CNN will often exceed the peak viewership of either of those outlets.
I think it's an important value worth protecting, even if there is a large bubble on both sides. There is some limited penetration and cross-pollination between the groups and it does filter through sometimes.
I honestly believe that freedom of speech and the willingness to engage in earnest debate of opposing ideas is as much a cultural value as it is a legal one. Without the cultural respect of such an idea, the legal value is not much use. If your university is filled with a student body that will loudly shoutdown and protest and cancel anyone with an opposite opinion from speaking there, it's a sign of a decline in that cultural value. I don't know what the solution to that is, it's certainly not an easy one, but there is no regulatory solution, and the internet isn't the source of the problem.
Maybe the only real defense is just the sum noise of a bunch of loud cranks like me desperately shouting into the ether that it's a value worth protecting.
> Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place.
I jumped the gun based on past conversations I've had or read.
> Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
That may be true to some extent (although I suspect they're waning as people tune it out), but those mechanisms are inherent in all forms of mass media as well. Maybe the triopoly that existed between CBS, NBC, and ABC was comfortable enough and stable enough for those decades they had it, that they seemed to not be desperate for income and eyeballs in the same way that they are in today's cutthroat battle for attention. The modern situation is more of a throwback to the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer's day, which itself dates back to the founding of t...
Fake news about Hillary Clinton is a good example, as is Breitbart's very existence, as are foreign reddit bots, as are a lot of political extremists parroting views in their own posts on subjects about which they have no knowledge, etc.
Granted, for things like Breitbart, one has to affirmatively opt-in.
If someone is saying something you don't like on those platforms, just unfollow them / mute them / block them. Nothing is said on those platforms, by the way, that hasn't been said a thousand different times in a thousand different forums, chat rooms, or blogs that preceded them. But I digress, I both support the liberty of people to speak freely on the internet and wish the centralized apps would die off.
As a hyperbolic example, I've created a support group called "the summary execution of people with the username chrisco255 group", you're free to block the group and ignore us, but all 255,000 of us are very angry people looking for vengeance...
By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
No, I didn't. He made a strawman about a practice that is currently illegal and has been illegal for hundreds of years of common law. Literally threatening someone's life with summary execution is illegal whether by one person or 255K. The 255K scenario is meant to be a hyperbolic example, but the truth is that such threats do exist for people on the internet and more often than not those types of threats come implicitly from sovereign powers who have access to such numbers of henchmen.
How much more important is it then, to protect free speech on the internet, when so much power and threats are wielded in far more subtle and insidious ways?
I think it’s both, but ageing plays a significant role. As I have grown older, I am able to both notice and ignore more things. Knowing more about the state of the world means you just hear more, from less. An article that required 10min read and 3 min looking up definitions now requires 3min skim and I can move on to another one.
This makes the present “more shrill”. Being able to more quickly identify content of value (or lack thereof) means you trawl more easily through large amounts.
Of course, it’s important to remember that we are not infallible and trusting yourself too much with these techniques is an easy way to become disconnected from the real world.
Being younger means more easily being able to narrow your focus, and less easily feel like the world is too loud.
(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.
Its not just the people who are missing ("young hacksters" as you put it), but also the people who are here; the HN populace is gradually approaching general populace, there are lots of people commenting here who have no connection to the cutting edge tech scene that HN originates from (even if HN never was particularly exclusive club). And to clarify, I'm one of those people, so I'm not saying this to be elitist or anything.
HN is quite money-oriented and economically liberal, although nothing beats Blind in this regard. Many FOSS developers don't like this. I think it has less to do with age.
I find various economic views are represented, but the economic discussions are quite a bit less sophisticated than the technical ones. That's a general pattern of techie discourse: see also, e.g., the absurd simplifications around human intelligence and AI.
HN is a message board on a startup incubator -- no one gets into startups for fun, they do it to get rich. this comes with plenty of other biases.
that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.
That feels less like a techie discourse thing and more of an enthusiast/expert discourse one. Put a bunch of experts together and ask them to discuss their field, and you'll get some great discussions. Put the same people together and have them discuss something they're not that knowledgeable about, and well, the results won't differ much from the general population's attempts, except maybe with slightly more sophisticated language.
I suspect if you got a bunch of doctors, lawyers, architects, etc to discuss economics you'd get the same results as here for the most part.
"the orange website" negative sentiment is there from a lot of demographics, not just young-skewing, and sometimes it's easy to see why when discussions not infrequently devolve into ad hominems and ass-pull anecdata as a lot of people aren't equipped to deal with the idea of multiple points of view being valid, or x not being so binary as good or bad.
> HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.
HN users are mostly (but certainly not entirely) from a very specific and narrow demographic. It's true that the tech world is much broader and more varied than is reflected here.
This isn't a criticism of HN. Most fora have users from very specific and narrow demographics. Just different ones.
I associate sneering at "the orange website" with a very specific type — someone who's more curious than his ideology allows him, someone who is supposed to stay in his twitter bubble, regularly rooting out problematic follows, but who's nonetheless addicted to checking HN, which is the only place where he sees any different views, sort of the equivalent of a muslim alcoholic.
(i) Do anyone knows where that would be, or you know specific Discord servers? I would very much like to see how younger generation talk about tech, programming, entrepreneurship
it is a more decentralized pattern as each server has specific focus but they tend to have also "general discussion" / "off topic" kind of channels. people compose their own collection of servers they frequent
slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse
so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...
Here are a few STEM focused ones I'm in. Note, that much of the content (due to the younger age demographic) is people asking for homework help and such a lot of the time. Funny enough, that has died down now with the advent of ChatGPT. Equally, I've met many field experts who hang out in these groups too and people I've eventually become friends and colleagues with:
Do you remember the comments sections on torrent links, where people ask questions about things that were already explained in the torrent's readme? Discord is like that; people don't bother searching and ask the same things over and over.
It's very sad they hang out on a hostile platform that exhaustively monitors its users though. It will cause a big generation gap because I won't join them there.
I am old but would talk in discord if it had a better search and if it saved archives online so I can find past convos. It’s painful how much really good conversations and tech info gets lost when someone deletes a channel.
I think we’re partially returning to the ephemeral era of human communication. Discords, slacks, decentralized app channels, and self hosted forums all cease to exist quite easily. The semi-permanence of the web may be remembered as a brief era destroyed by spam and toxic social trends.
It's because fat clients (like WLM, which was Discord's DM UX before Discord) lost because they're not profitable.
Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space.
My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.
I hypothesize that a lot of interesting discussion also happens in smaller group chats, where people can be more candid while receiving reasonable responses. Public social media participants are often assholes or have ulterior motives.
It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helping to cultivate an environment for growth.
I highly doubt that most people on HN are even involved with most immature technologies other than being an end-user of some aspect of it. Ergo, I doubt that an HN discussion would have any significant impact on the growth of any kind of technology.
Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts?
Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.
"I highly doubt x" "facts don't care about feelings" "you're probably just an end-user" "you're probably defending it because it's shitty and you're over invested in" "you're a coward"
This is the kind of bullshit commentary people discuss things in private to get away from. Your comment contributes nothing positive, encouraging, no suspension of disbelief, no nurturing environment, only hostile derision and holier-than-thou posturing.
ii) graph the integral of human population and this is exponentially true. There is exponentially more past every year.
iii) I’m convinced that the single worst social/cultural event of the previous 25 years (and maybe longer) was the invention by social media of algorithms that bias what you see toward what maximizes engagement. Think about what this does. I put it this way: one person passes you on street and smiles and says “hi,” then another punches you in the face or publicly urinates themselves. Which maximizes engagement?
I’m not totally pessimistic though. I see the above cultural trend peaking. I’m also weirdly optimistic about AI. I say weirdly because I feel contrarian about this. Even super intelligent AGI doesn’t frighten me that much.
Let me put it this way: I am less afraid of a superintelligence than I am of mobs of ignorant humans, and I think the superintelligence might have more to fear as well. Neanderthals may have been smarter than us, but I’m sure we had that genocidal mob thing down. Intelligence doesn’t always win.
The most plausible dangerous AI scenario is exactly this, or some version of it; the use of AI by humans to brainwash and manipulate huge numbers of other humans.
This isn't autonomous AI takeover. It's humans getting their hands on a brand new kind of rock and bashing each other over the head with it like they have with every previous kind of rock.
It's not that I have zero concerns about AI, just that I'm not on the Yudkowski freakout train. There is no such thing as a technology that can't be used for evil.
A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking.
It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.
Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.
I can't speak for the author, but that comment rings true to me. The tech world did shift at some point from intending to produce things that improve people's lives to intending to produce things that mine people's attention, data, and wallets.
The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
It doesn’t help that we wasted a decade on social and crypto, which have by and large both ended up as duds, if not harmful (see CO2 emissions from Ethereum which ended up going proof of stake anyway).
> The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does.
I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.
And I agree with your first point. At least it feels like there's much less emphasis on improving people's lives. I still believe that a product has to have some perceived positive impact on a user's life to be successful. But nowadays, most of the time, that positive impact seems to be focused on instant gratification rather than long term utility. Since the widespread use of the internet became a thing, the back channel then allowed for treating the user as a commodity. I believe this may be one of the qualitative key differences between "now and then" and, if so, it may be a good answer to OP's question.
Better than "we're just getting old, it has always been that way", which I believe is not true.
I have been wrestling with a terrifying idea lately:
The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole.
The Internet itself is just bits pushed between computers, but the things we have built on it are dystopian, are a huge cause of the current loneliness epidemic (epidemics have an end date, this is a trend), and it's a way to control the masses.
The Internet, in a vacuum, could elevate humanity. But whatever we have now, it exploits our shortcomings for the profit of the few, and we are simply not made to have most of our social interactions behind a screen that's always within our cone of vision.
It's been hard to live with this, as a software engineer. A veritable crisis of faith for me.
> The Internet, in a vacuum, could elevate humanity. But whatever we have now, it exploits our shortcomings for the profit of the few, and are simply not made to have most of our social interactions behind a screen that's always in our cone of vision.
This reminds me of broadcast television. When TV first started becoming a thing that regular people had, it was widely considered to be a force for good. Being able to educate the masses, to provide people with good information they need to know, to bring communities together.
In less than 20 years, TV showed itself to be a failure at all of those things. To the point where in 1961, Newton Minnow proclaimed TV to be "a vast wasteland" and bemoaned its failure to live up to its potential during a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters.
The internet (well, the web, really) is following a very, very similar trajectory.
I think OP is distinguishing between the Internet, which is a neutral technology, "a series of tubes" vs. the horrible web sites being built on top of it. There is plenty of good in these tubes and plenty of bad. Let's focus blame on the actual bad sites that push the average down to negative. The Internet is not just Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
> i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.
Yeah or YouTube or TikTok.
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
100% agreed!
We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong.
I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification.
This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.
>Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us.
It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are.
Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves.
Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.
as we age, humans reflect more upon the past, probably because doing so helped the tribe to survive... the memories of the older members of the tribe provided information that was important to survival of the tribe, such as hey remember that water hole that we came across 40 years ago etc... thus humans developed adaptively a tendency to reflect upon the past as they age
Right now, we are in a period of upheaval. Everyone knows that everything is about to change, but we don't know exactly how.
Transformers are going to create huge shifts in how businesses work on a fundamental level. The stable diffusion and LLMs could collectively eliminate huge numbers of jobs.
The past doesn't have the same worries, and this tech revolution is not looking good for many.
I like it. I'm getting older. Get the people here you want. If you don't shout out to my past, I'll find somewhere else that does it. Not "my" issue. Not "your" issue.
There is nothing wrong with a healthy appreciation for the past.
It's a modern phenomena to disregard everything that has gone before as "outdated". The tech industry has had a good long run of not looking back, but we are far enough along that a lot of good ideas that have been abandoned or left fallow are sitting around waiting to be re-implemented or reinterpreted.
Two examples I'm involved in:
- https://htmx.org is building on the idea of hypermedia and has a distinct 90s flavor to it
- https://hyperscript.org is a re-imagination of HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, for the web
I like the idea of building organically on the ideas of the past. Lots of people way smarter than me just happened to be born at a different time in the arc of the computer revolution. Why wouldn't I look back at what they did, play with it and maybe think about how it might apply to today?
Welp I've read 4 or 5 comments that give plausible yet different explanations. So I won't add my own but just ask: do you think it's a positive or negative thing? I prefer to not have the old stuff in the headlines. It's more interesting when someone references an old article in the comments.
I suspect that was sarcasm, but I think it's true. We were too busy talking about the new stuff in the present, and what we were trying to build for the future. It's a real shift - not total, but it's there.
Extreme lack of innovation in tech. Everything “new” is bland, corporate, rehashed, locked down, drivel. There’s still great stuff happening but it’s not universally interesting like things tended to be years ago.
Things weren't universally interesting years ago either. There was plenty of corps being late to industries, producing bad products or services that were out of touch and clearly hadn't consulted with real-world users.
We just tend to remember the victors. Have a skim through some old computer magazine archives, or old audio gear magazine archives, you'll soon realize that there was a lot of junk even 40 years ago, let alone plenty of inappropriate uses of tech that never caught on in any meaningful capacity. The industry has always been full of solutions in search of problems.
Some sick, demented part of me loves seeing whacky and weird over-engineering of decades-past. Another part of me loves being humbled by realizing the potential of something that simply never caught on, but is now lost in terms of patent limbo or IP ownership. I've bought a few old bits of tech, loved them and make regular use of them.
It's high time we do so and we actually take the time to look back before jumping all-in on new ventures. Many fancy new projects that claimed, for example, to be so much faster/better than "oldschool" SQL databases learned the hard way what ACID means (or rather, their users did).
Soooo much in hipster tech is reinventing the wheel all over again.
It's always been like that I think... I guess the only difference is that I've noticed I'm doing it too now. But I think that's only because I now have a past to be nostalgic about.
Perhaps the same is true of HN / tech communities more generally. Tech as a sector was much smaller a couple of decades ago. And many of us probably only got our first computers in the late 90s early 2000s. I'd argue it was until the 2010s that the internet really become ubiquitous. I'm guessing a large segment of us have only recently been able to talk about past technology in any meaningful way.
If you get a chance to read Computer Power and Human Reason by Weizenbaum, now is the time to do it by any means available - especially if curiosity drives your question.
Seconding this. I recently re-read this and was impressed how pertinent it still is, especially on AI. Weizenbaum wrote the original AI chat program, Eliza, almost sixty years ago.
The only certainty in tech, is that there will always be some tool/software package that looks to solve an already established solution with a new approach, only time will tell if it will be successful. Reflecting on the past can shed light on why somethings remain unchanged decades later, and why others have fallen behind. But I think the real answer to your question, is whilst having a coffee/tea/break whatever, it can be nice to read an older article, or a new article on old software, to remind yourself about the "old days" or see how you wold solve a past problem today. It's a bit like classic cars, some people like to buy the car they had or couldn't afford when they were a teenager, equally now as a tech worker (hopefully earning good money) you can indulge and purchase a snes/COM64/Apple 2gs or whatever.
Software went from being a new industry to an industry. There's more history to discuss. And now there is a bygone era to view through rose-tinted lenses.
The older you get, the more you realize that all the shiny new stuff, and exciting news, and ways the world is changing...they are really not all that new. Pretty-similar stuff happened decades, centuries, and millennia ago.
And getting worked up about all the "new and exciting!" is an outlook best suited to being a simple consumer of entertainment. Vs. if you're no longer a kid, in a world that has some rather dire social and sustainability problems...then whether you're trying to understand the big picture in order to do something useful about the problems, or just to lose yourself in nostalgia for a bit, the past gets considerably more important.
Nothing like generative AI has ever happened. This is new, which is part of why it’s so exciting.
No I don’t think these things are going to become sentient (in their present form at least) but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.
It's significantly less exciting when you know that the economics of generative AI means that it's largest and most popular use case will be for uninteresting things like automating the graphics for a block of Facebook ads.
Also significantly less exciting when you sense it is probably much more like pinterest (more of the same) than the wonderful cgi dinosaurs of jurassic park 1993.
I absolutely agree it'll change the world. But in a meta sense, we've been through this before. Even in living memory, my grandparents were middle-aged before computers became a big thing and at least one of them grew up in an unelectrified Irish village.
Electrification is an example of that, it takes a massive amount of time to put the infrastructure in. Then even when you got a power pole to your house, you had to run lights and it was unlikely you had any other appliances that used power. Those were slowly and expensively added over time.
AI may work from the opposite direction. It uses the infrastructure that already exists, we have power poles, and network lines, and all kinds of computing devices gathering information and feeding it back to datacenters. This sets up a 'fertile data environment'. One potential outcome here is we see an increase AI compute power over the next few years with only a moderate increase in AI intelligence, then by change in algorithm that compute power is now far more efficient in creating intelligence. This could manifest itself as "AI is a great helper for a programmer" to "Actually, why do we have so many human programmers at all" in an exceptionally short time frame.
It is the disruptive timeframe that is the largest risk to society. If for some reason we go from "Corporations need people" to "Corporations don't need people" in a very short time frame, we'll Moloch ourselves in to high unemployment and social instability quickly.
In the early days of computers it was a struggle. A struggle to get time on a machine, whether it be by punched card, paper tape, standing in line to submit your job, getting on a timeshare terminal, or connecting to the mainframe via 300-baud modem. The modem speaker spoke of the struggle when connecting.
You then got ahold of a $3K Apple ][ computer with 32K of memory and integer basic, and the only way to get performance was 6502 assembly programming. A struggle.
Then PCs came along, where nobody ever needed more than 640K memory, so it was a struggle to partition your work to fit it all in, but at least you didn't have to do assembler anymore since there was FORTRAN or Pascal.
And then the barriers lowered even further with GUIs and more memory, but you still had to worry about true multitasking not really being implemented correctly, and your poorly-written program could still hog the cycles. A slightly lower struggle.
And now there is more memory than you know what to do with, unless you are a rocket or climate scientist. And you infrequently have to worry about performance. Code efficiency? Bah!
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadWith past, you know what it was, you have a romanticized image about it. At least I do.
Unfortunately reality doesn't require us to, it's only our comfort that does.
So it's much more fun to talk about the different ways, say, 1980s game consoles handled graphics – each had unique chips and unique ideas, but all simple enough to be explained in a single blog post – than it is to talk about how all consoles today use the same hardware and the same software stack to achieve the same mind-bogglingly complicated results that require years of study to understand.
Same with OSes, cars, cameras, you name it.
i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever.
ii) The fact that the past keeps growing. The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational.
iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet.
This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the tech was just just that, tech.
The latest, sure, by definition.
But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.
"It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio. ...[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio....Above all it is necessary to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones,...to provide a clear worldview"
While a decentralized internet may host extreme views in certain pockets, it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
Maybe the censurious social media apps booting off people with opposing opinions to liberal mainstream in collusion with intelligence agencies actively embedded in their organizations? But that just underscores the dangers of centralization.
I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints. If that be the case, then you would find great solace in the writings of Goebbels.
I for one hold freedom of speech to be sancrosanct, and being a student of history will never waver from its defense.
> it also enables a diversity of viewpoints to be expressed, which more often than not serve to regulate those in power as well as inform those without.
I have grown very doubtful about the notion that just having a diversity of viewpoints being expressed serves as a check to those in power, or that it serves to meaningfully inform people.
It increasingly appears to me that the sheer quantity of different viewpoints does the opposite of those things. It generates an ocean of emotional noise that provides cover for those in power to do what they wish, and encourages people to only accept information and views that support the opinions they already have rather than meaningfully informing them.
> I suspect, based on your posturing in the reply, however, that you've been convinced that more control is necessary to counter extreme x or y wing viewpoints
Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place. I'm just saying that it is increasingly looking to me like the internet (especially social media) has managed to remove a lot of the benefits of free speech.
Saying that is far from saying "free speech is bad" or "speech needs to be regulated". It's saying that the mechanisms on the internet appear to amplify emotional or tribal, rather than rational or thought-out, responses. That sort of discourse has very little social upside.
Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
What you're describing is a balkanization of viewpoints by both consumers and producers rather than a real exposure to a diversity of them. To some extent that has occurred in modern society. It is certainly possible to fully live within your bubble and never be exposed to earnest criticism of your worldview. This trend, of course, pre-dates social media by many centuries.
Prior to the printing press and mass literacy, people would only ever be exposed to opinions within their immediate vicinity (and you would almost certainly never hear the opinions of ancient dead people such as Socrates or Locke). Even still, after those proliferated, there was quite a bit of friction and most people have always defaulted to adoption of local norms or customs without a second thought about correctness.
Mass communications such as TV and radio (along with nationally syndicated newspapers) enabled a handful of companies to gather an immense amount of control over the national conversation. They could almost mold an outcome in a presidential election on the basis of what questions they posed at a debate and how they made the candidates look on camera and what headlines they ran. From a certain perspective, it may have appeared as if the media was rather neutral. But the mass media itself became an embedded fixture of Washington and all the other major power structures that exist within the country. How could the media both act as an agent of common people and maintain a tight relationship with powerful insiders to get exclusive scoops and invitations to social functions? The internet enabled a critique of the media at the same scale as the media itself, in addition to those in power. A viral critique of ABC, NBC, Fox or CNN will often exceed the peak viewership of either of those outlets.
I think it's an important value worth protecting, even if there is a large bubble on both sides. There is some limited penetration and cross-pollination between the groups and it does filter through sometimes.
I honestly believe that freedom of speech and the willingness to engage in earnest debate of opposing ideas is as much a cultural value as it is a legal one. Without the cultural respect of such an idea, the legal value is not much use. If your university is filled with a student body that will loudly shoutdown and protest and cancel anyone with an opposite opinion from speaking there, it's a sign of a decline in that cultural value. I don't know what the solution to that is, it's certainly not an easy one, but there is no regulatory solution, and the internet isn't the source of the problem.
Maybe the only real defense is just the sum noise of a bunch of loud cranks like me desperately shouting into the ether that it's a value worth protecting.
> Your suspicion could not be more mistaken. I'm baffled as to what led you to it in the first place.
I jumped the gun based on past conversations I've had or read.
> Further, I suspect that those mechanisms are intentionally like that, because they provide the easiest and most profitable method of monetizing.
That may be true to some extent (although I suspect they're waning as people tune it out), but those mechanisms are inherent in all forms of mass media as well. Maybe the triopoly that existed between CBS, NBC, and ABC was comfortable enough and stable enough for those decades they had it, that they seemed to not be desperate for income and eyeballs in the same way that they are in today's cutthroat battle for attention. The modern situation is more of a throwback to the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer's day, which itself dates back to the founding of t...
Granted, for things like Breitbart, one has to affirmatively opt-in.
Facebook and Twitter are a pretty damned big pocket.
By the way, threats to life, liberty, and property have always been illegal in this country. But no, I'm definitely not afraid or worried about some idle threats from basement dwelling neckbeards.
How much more important is it then, to protect free speech on the internet, when so much power and threats are wielded in far more subtle and insidious ways?
You can see, in real-time, how well a comment went over, how quickly it spreads, and rapidly correlate it with specific demographics.
The upvotes on each comment here are a simple version of that, but it functions just as easily with Likes, reddit updoots, re-tweets, etc.
It's almost a skinner-box at this point
Scams however always existed
This makes the present “more shrill”. Being able to more quickly identify content of value (or lack thereof) means you trawl more easily through large amounts.
Of course, it’s important to remember that we are not infallible and trusting yourself too much with these techniques is an easy way to become disconnected from the real world.
Being younger means more easily being able to narrow your focus, and less easily feel like the world is too loud.
that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.
I suspect if you got a bunch of doctors, lawyers, architects, etc to discuss economics you'd get the same results as here for the most part.
HN users are mostly (but certainly not entirely) from a very specific and narrow demographic. It's true that the tech world is much broader and more varied than is reflected here.
This isn't a criticism of HN. Most fora have users from very specific and narrow demographics. Just different ones.
slightly different decentralization patterns on matrix and discourse
so the tech/programming discussion is very much alive, but the entrepreneurship angle quite a bit less so...
Furlough (Great Startup Community): https://discord.gg/furlough
Science and Math Association: https://discord.gg/Yqf9GGjV
Mathematics: https://discord.gg/zZ94XYkt37
Control Engineering: https://discord.gg/mPwkRJKG
DIY Tech: https://discord.gg/diytech
Computer Vision: https://discord.gg/4BXczxNJwK
Adafruit: https://discord.gg/adafruit
Better C++: https://discord.gg/e3aXc2xUWr
Python: https://discord.gg/python
Unity Discord: https://discord.gg/unity
The Programmers Hangout: https://discord.gg/programming
The Coding Den: https://discord.gg/code
Game Dev Network: https://discord.gg/gdn
Developer-Ecosystem: https://discord.gg/deveco
OpenAI: https://discord.gg/openai
Makers HQ: https://discord.gg/QWtd5Z6N
Do you remember the comments sections on torrent links, where people ask questions about things that were already explained in the torrent's readme? Discord is like that; people don't bother searching and ask the same things over and over.
Thin clients, however, mean you're data minable and get to pay for things that, instead of occupying your and your friends' machine (like custom emotes, animated avys, voice clips), now occupy valuable company server space.
My historiography here spans from the present to 2000, though; I have no idea how IRC worked or what people did pre-Yahoo! Messenger or WLM.
It takes a lot of courage to discuss a new technology while in its baby form, which can easily be smothered by demands of perfection. A private group chat can do a better job at helping to cultivate an environment for growth.
Who needs courage when there's objectivity in facts?
Even so, people still rabidly defend the new shiny simply because it's new or something they're heavily invested in, so courage and facts aren't always the whole story either.
This is the kind of bullshit commentary people discuss things in private to get away from. Your comment contributes nothing positive, encouraging, no suspension of disbelief, no nurturing environment, only hostile derision and holier-than-thou posturing.
iii) I’m convinced that the single worst social/cultural event of the previous 25 years (and maybe longer) was the invention by social media of algorithms that bias what you see toward what maximizes engagement. Think about what this does. I put it this way: one person passes you on street and smiles and says “hi,” then another punches you in the face or publicly urinates themselves. Which maximizes engagement?
I’m not totally pessimistic though. I see the above cultural trend peaking. I’m also weirdly optimistic about AI. I say weirdly because I feel contrarian about this. Even super intelligent AGI doesn’t frighten me that much.
Let me put it this way: I am less afraid of a superintelligence than I am of mobs of ignorant humans, and I think the superintelligence might have more to fear as well. Neanderthals may have been smarter than us, but I’m sure we had that genocidal mob thing down. Intelligence doesn’t always win.
This isn't autonomous AI takeover. It's humans getting their hands on a brand new kind of rock and bashing each other over the head with it like they have with every previous kind of rock.
It's not that I have zero concerns about AI, just that I'm not on the Yudkowski freakout train. There is no such thing as a technology that can't be used for evil.
A slightly different twist: an ever increasing fraction of the hacking that we might want to talk about was in the past or is tied to the past (e.g. retrocomputing). The industry has grown, but it has also become more corporate and business-focused. Normal users, and even most programmers, don't "hack" in the traditional sense of finding clever solutions or workarounds to make computers do novel things. Some of it's just plain, fairly obvious programming, fitting pieces together more than actually creating. Even ChadGPT can do that, which is why younger programmers who don't remember real hacking are so easily impressed by it. Then there's a lot that's not technical at all, but more about arbitrage and rent collecting ... oops, sorry, I meant markets and business models. Not about abusing people's privacy or ripping them off, no sir, none of that in VC-fueled Silicon Valley for sure. But it's still not hacking.
It's not that hacking doesn't still occur. Plenty still does, perhaps even more than ever, but it's no longer enough to keep up with the ever lengthening arc of computing history. As a proportion it's less, so those who are interested in such things look more and more to the past.
The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).
capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does.
I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.
And I agree with your first point. At least it feels like there's much less emphasis on improving people's lives. I still believe that a product has to have some perceived positive impact on a user's life to be successful. But nowadays, most of the time, that positive impact seems to be focused on instant gratification rather than long term utility. Since the widespread use of the internet became a thing, the back channel then allowed for treating the user as a commodity. I believe this may be one of the qualitative key differences between "now and then" and, if so, it may be a good answer to OP's question.
Better than "we're just getting old, it has always been that way", which I believe is not true.
The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole.
The Internet itself is just bits pushed between computers, but the things we have built on it are dystopian, are a huge cause of the current loneliness epidemic (epidemics have an end date, this is a trend), and it's a way to control the masses.
The Internet, in a vacuum, could elevate humanity. But whatever we have now, it exploits our shortcomings for the profit of the few, and we are simply not made to have most of our social interactions behind a screen that's always within our cone of vision.
It's been hard to live with this, as a software engineer. A veritable crisis of faith for me.
This reminds me of broadcast television. When TV first started becoming a thing that regular people had, it was widely considered to be a force for good. Being able to educate the masses, to provide people with good information they need to know, to bring communities together.
In less than 20 years, TV showed itself to be a failure at all of those things. To the point where in 1961, Newton Minnow proclaimed TV to be "a vast wasteland" and bemoaned its failure to live up to its potential during a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters.
The internet (well, the web, really) is following a very, very similar trajectory.
i'm convinced the dead internet theory is an inevitability for the reasons you outline.
Even if there is good in the far corners, most don't find it anymore.
Yeah or YouTube or TikTok.
> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available.
100% agreed!
We thought we were building a better world. We were so wrong.
I'm convinced that what went wrong was monetisation related though. The internet was great when people made things for fun and to educate each other. It was the perverse impulse of monetization that caused recommendation algorithms, the push for 'engagement' caused the bubbles and the inflation of anger posts. The pervasive tracking. The bait and switching. The enshittification.
This is one of the reasons why I block all ads and never whitelist anything.
I disagree. Tech was never a "force for good". It's always been a tool, a physical manifestation of the science we pursue as part of our species desire for knowledge of the world around us.
It can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions for those are.
Right now it's used for a lot of evil things because the people in charge of using it are not altruistic. By and large, the people in charge of government at all levels in the US are elderly and grew up before the space age began. Their focus is not on bringing technological benefits to anyone. It's on bringing all benefits of any kind to themselves.
Tech will be a force for good if we can change ourselves and our country to make it that. It will be used for evil, too. Like any tool, it's on us to use it correctly and wisely.
Transformers are going to create huge shifts in how businesses work on a fundamental level. The stable diffusion and LLMs could collectively eliminate huge numbers of jobs.
The past doesn't have the same worries, and this tech revolution is not looking good for many.
If you don't want HN to do old stories, stop wearing flares!
Wearing flares, in the right context, can be hip and counter-cultural as well!
https://genius.com/Dexys-there-there-my-dear-lyrics
It's a modern phenomena to disregard everything that has gone before as "outdated". The tech industry has had a good long run of not looking back, but we are far enough along that a lot of good ideas that have been abandoned or left fallow are sitting around waiting to be re-implemented or reinterpreted.
Two examples I'm involved in:
- https://htmx.org is building on the idea of hypermedia and has a distinct 90s flavor to it
- https://hyperscript.org is a re-imagination of HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, for the web
I like the idea of building organically on the ideas of the past. Lots of people way smarter than me just happened to be born at a different time in the arc of the computer revolution. Why wouldn't I look back at what they did, play with it and maybe think about how it might apply to today?
We just tend to remember the victors. Have a skim through some old computer magazine archives, or old audio gear magazine archives, you'll soon realize that there was a lot of junk even 40 years ago, let alone plenty of inappropriate uses of tech that never caught on in any meaningful capacity. The industry has always been full of solutions in search of problems.
Some sick, demented part of me loves seeing whacky and weird over-engineering of decades-past. Another part of me loves being humbled by realizing the potential of something that simply never caught on, but is now lost in terms of patent limbo or IP ownership. I've bought a few old bits of tech, loved them and make regular use of them.
Soooo much in hipster tech is reinventing the wheel all over again.
Perhaps the same is true of HN / tech communities more generally. Tech as a sector was much smaller a couple of decades ago. And many of us probably only got our first computers in the late 90s early 2000s. I'd argue it was until the 2010s that the internet really become ubiquitous. I'm guessing a large segment of us have only recently been able to talk about past technology in any meaningful way.
And getting worked up about all the "new and exciting!" is an outlook best suited to being a simple consumer of entertainment. Vs. if you're no longer a kid, in a world that has some rather dire social and sustainability problems...then whether you're trying to understand the big picture in order to do something useful about the problems, or just to lose yourself in nostalgia for a bit, the past gets considerably more important.
No I don’t think these things are going to become sentient (in their present form at least) but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.
> but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.
That's not new. Steam power, the first computers, _especially_ electricity did things no previous technology could.
And it massively changed the world.... so, um, buckle up, I guess.
Electrification is an example of that, it takes a massive amount of time to put the infrastructure in. Then even when you got a power pole to your house, you had to run lights and it was unlikely you had any other appliances that used power. Those were slowly and expensively added over time.
AI may work from the opposite direction. It uses the infrastructure that already exists, we have power poles, and network lines, and all kinds of computing devices gathering information and feeding it back to datacenters. This sets up a 'fertile data environment'. One potential outcome here is we see an increase AI compute power over the next few years with only a moderate increase in AI intelligence, then by change in algorithm that compute power is now far more efficient in creating intelligence. This could manifest itself as "AI is a great helper for a programmer" to "Actually, why do we have so many human programmers at all" in an exceptionally short time frame.
It is the disruptive timeframe that is the largest risk to society. If for some reason we go from "Corporations need people" to "Corporations don't need people" in a very short time frame, we'll Moloch ourselves in to high unemployment and social instability quickly.
You then got ahold of a $3K Apple ][ computer with 32K of memory and integer basic, and the only way to get performance was 6502 assembly programming. A struggle.
Then PCs came along, where nobody ever needed more than 640K memory, so it was a struggle to partition your work to fit it all in, but at least you didn't have to do assembler anymore since there was FORTRAN or Pascal.
And then the barriers lowered even further with GUIs and more memory, but you still had to worry about true multitasking not really being implemented correctly, and your poorly-written program could still hog the cycles. A slightly lower struggle.
And now there is more memory than you know what to do with, unless you are a rocket or climate scientist. And you infrequently have to worry about performance. Code efficiency? Bah!
It's all about the struggle.
https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/is-culture-stuck-eb31712...