I guess these guys took over all the telegram infrastructure of Western Union in 2006.
It's cheaper to send flowers with a card!
Unfortunately, you can’t physically harm people over the internet, so different security measures must be taken.
The odds of getting caught attacking a Russian computer from the US or attacking a US computer from Russia are essentially zero for any scale small enough to not have major foreign policy implications.
Yes how unfortunate?
https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/0301-The_FAX_Machine...
The Lindy effect makes perfect sense has an heuristic to evaluate the remaining lifetime of technologies and species at a given point in time. It’s trivial to prove that it works for anything whose survival curve is convex.
Despite its apparent love for rationality (which I enjoy), it seems like a large part of HN is just as subjective as anyone and unable to accept things that don’t fit their mental model.
All people have that skill, of course, but this field seems to have more than its fair share of such.
I mean it's a tech entrepreneurial news aggregator on a tech incubator's website. Their whole raison d'etre is that "future is better buy my technology so I can get $$$" -- that's why this site exists.
Is it that it doesn't fit the mental model, or is it failing to read the room?
Smartphones (since first iPhone) - 14 years.
Laptops (since first Apple Powerbook) - 30 years.
PCs (since first IBM PC) - 40 years.
C programming language will be 50 years old next year.
SQL will turn 50 in 2024
This principle implies the C programming language will outlive Rust, Go, Python, etc. I'm not sure how I feel about that. There's a good chance its right, but I'm uncomfortable imagining my grandchildren learning C's weird quirks.
There's definitely codebases written in C today which will outlive me, like the Linux kernel. And most of those codebases will probably never migrate to a different language.
The question of whether a technology simply exists vs. whether it retains its popularity is an interesting one. Chairs and forks will both exist and be popular. iPhones will exist, but they won't be popular on some time scale. So it is interesting to think whether C is closer to one or the other :)
In any case, I'd argue that most of the quirks are due to undefined behaviour as implemented in the compilers. And 50 years from now the language have probably evolved some more anyway.
I learned Dvorak a decade ago and loved it unless someone else had to use my computer or I had to use a shared computer. I'm typing this on a qwerty keyboard and I'm okay with that now.
Typewriter layouts are designed to avoid jamming, but not by reducing typing speed. They place letters that are pressed in direct succession apart, so that the levers don’t collide. Trained typists can write pretty damn fast on a typewriter.
I've always wanted a Blick, their "scientific" DHIATENSOR layout intrigues me. They also made a qwerty version and I seem to remember a story that their salespeople would make you sign a waiver that you were choosing a less efficient keyboard if you bought one. That's certainly 90% marketing for their layout and maybe 10% fact, but I find it amusing (if true, but I can't seem to find a reference to it any more).
I'll bet typewriter-trained typists can really move. It's definitely a separate skill, at least for the manual typewriters in my collection which have about an inch of key travel and a heck of a lot more actuation force than the gateron red switches I use at work. :-)
Ultimately I find that the fastest layout is the one you know.
... and that really reduces typing speed. When i switched to dworak I was amazed how my fingers just roll on a keyboard, forming sentences faster than I even form a conscious understanding in which succession should I move my fingers. It just happens as if by itself!! Just think of a word to type and it is already on the screen.
That may be the effect for you, but it's not a goal. It's maybe a tradeoff, but machine writing is a trainable craft. Usual results for trained people are at about 200 - 400 characters per minute measured over 10 minutes. Championship results are at up to 900 characters.
[1]: http://www.recordholdersrepublic.co.uk/world-record-holders/...
Dvorak has specialised right- and left-handed layouts. Maybe it also needs specialised one finger layouts, too.
I can imagine you'd need to use both thumbs extensively or you'd be jumping back and forth. I definitely found that when I was laying on my side on the couch, propped up with one arm, qwerty was easier to use with one hand. Not that that's an ergonomic or sustainable way to type, but I was a lazy college student and I didn't care.
What about them learning English's even weirder quirks? Does that make you uncomfortable as well?
I have come to the point that I sort of accept C's quirks, and, with the appropriate mindset, I can even love them. I certainly see myself as an old man teaching these arcane quirks to a young and innocent audience.
And COBOL is extremely niche, while C is still quite common and useful to know.
Certainly higher-level languages have edged out C in many domains though.
That kind of Apple revisionism is not correct. The NEC UltraLite predated Apple clamshells by 3 years (1988), and luggables with a battery configuration have been available as early as 1981 (Osborne 1 with an aftermarket 1 hour battery add-on).
“The TRS-80 Model 100 is a portable computer introduced in 1983. It is one of the first notebook-style computers, featuring a keyboard and liquid crystal display, in a battery-powered package roughly the size and shape of a notepad or large book.”
James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine. He just came up with an invention that made it a lot more efficient.
I'm still inclined to think someone would have jumped to a smartphone without a keyboard. But it's also true that the iPhone had plenty of critics early on and arguably didn't fully hit its stride until the 3GS.
I mean, imagine a parallel world where those smartphones weren't designed to shove ads down your throat and where they could be used to be as productive as with a laptop, and where people could help to automate their lives on their own with it.
That would be so amazing.
Entire generations have been lifted from poverty due to it.
Smartphones aren’t consumption-only.
I disagree, even when talkingn about a smartphone as a human interface device and not, as was the actual context of the thread, a computing device.
Having a, say, DeX-enabled Android (or even potentially powered by fairly traditional Linux, if one doesn’t just use a major maker device with stock software) smartphone as a computing device doesn’t preclude standard desktop I/O devices fo interact with it in manner very similar to a standard desktop PC.
> They are not usable as general-purpose creation machines.
Again, as an exclusive computing device, they are just about as much as is any computing device.
Even as an exclusive HID, there’s a giant excluded middle between “consumption only” and “not usable as general purpose creation machines”.
You seem to be conflating the ability to be used with a limited interface with a restriction to be used with only a particular interface. I desktop PC has the ability to be used without a graphics tablet. It would be a much more limited creation device if it were restricted to being used without one. And the same is true of everything that isn’t a touchscreen, microphone, or other built in human interface and smartphones. But a smartphone as an exclusive computing device does not imply the limitations of its built-in interfaces, since having external interfaces is also a standard feature of the class.
Any alternative where trade didn't follow optimal path is due to regulation / force. And in most, the force required to steer humans away from their nature also kills innovation.
Ergo: you cant have a miracle chip in your pocket with no one using it to sell you potato chips.
2. Capitalism is not "natural" either and only started developing in the post-renaissance world.
3. Natural selection demonstrates conclusively that relying on purely natural processes to drive "innovation" often lead to highly non-optimal and harmful trends.
4. Most of the major scientific and technological innovations of the 20th century were either the direct result of or funded by "force" which I take to mean government.
5. Advertisement was not the only monetisation strategy that the internet and telecommunication industry could have taken. The internet could have very easily gone down the subscription route and the only reason why anybody thinks otherwise is because of the decade long marketing that has normalised getting everything for "free".
Well-studied? By whom? In what journals?
The Lindy Effect may be true, but based on that Wikipedia article's sources, you can't make a good scientific claim for that being the case. Even if you could, you still run into all the current problems such a nebulous branch of science must contend with, such as the peer review problem and the reproducibility problem.
It's not claiming to be a scientific law; it's a heuristic for making decisions. The rest of Taleb's books are also about making decisions, not "being right" (whatever that means).
A concrete example is if I'm writing a blog, and I want people to read my posts in 5 or 10 years. Do I go with the cloud platform that just launched or an older hosting provider? This is a decision people make every day. Of course there are many people who don't care if their blog is readable in 5 years; this isn't a judgement.
The Lindy effect is not about what's "better"; it's about what lasts longer. It's also not making statements about the present, which is what survivorship bias typically means.
Older people obviously will die sooner, but having survived does give you some information. For example, your life expectancy at age 1 is 75 years, but at age 40 it's closer to 79 years.
e.g. https://www.annuityadvantage.com/resources/life-expectancy-t...
The Lindy effect is a theory about the surviving examples specifically.
My personal take is that there’s a an apex for a particular generation of technology, and that is good forever. A 1930s Farmall tractor is an example of that... there are improved modern replacements, but the 1930 model still does the job near optimally. I would guess that a non trivial number of those tractors will be in use in 2130.
1980s/early 90s minicomputers are similar. Many of these devices are still in use today, and probably could be kept in use for decades to come.
Modern tech is a little harder because we’ve been in a rapid growth phase and the software services based world is more aligned with production than sustainment. I’d bet that trend will change in 20-30 years.
He says "one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten is: Don't trade a gun for a snow machine". This is exactly what you're saying, and it's backed up by a lot of experience living without power and water!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH15Kua5P1Y&t=918s
He also says "everyone one of us has to decide when to jump ship on a technology"
He says canoes peaked in the 1960's, and you can buy a used one for like $125 that's the same as what you'd buy today for thousands. Same with hand saws. He maintains old saws and chainsaws and uses them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH15Kua5P1Y&t=746s
when you look at any kind of manufactured goods a lot of things have reached their peak and are either poorer quality than they used to be or they're just the same quality as their peak
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I found this channel via a video about building an off grid cabin from scratch for a couple thousand dollars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOOXmfkXpkM
It's good -- a lot of it is built by hand with a hammer and nails. He even says load bearing screws are too expensive, and nails are better!
All of the advice reminds me of Taleb, because it's not necessarily trying to be "right", but rather distilling rules of thumb from practice.
The old one my parents had was aluminum with a metal gear. The modern version has been MBAed to death — the gear is plastic, and the lid is so thin that you could probably replicate it with 2 plys of aluminum foil. It costs more and is measurably worse in any dimension.
Grummans are great and they're still being made (though not by the original company).
However, for recreational/tripping/whitewater, Royalex-based canoes were better for a variety of reasons. Unfortunately the material is no longer being made because its intended use (Go Carts) didn't take off to the degree planned. The company continued to make it on a more or less breakeven basis but upon a change of ownership the new owner decided to scrap it. There have been one or two efforts to make something equivalent, but AFAIK they haven't panned out.
There are still plenty of well-made fiberglass/Kevlar boats being made but they're much more fragile.
Many preventable deaths happen every year as a result.
He says it cost me $100 to get the best that has ever been made, and it's backed up by a lot of experience living off grid
The Lindy effect is the realization that your encounter of something is like a random sample. "How old are chairs when I exist?" "How old are iPhones?"
Office chairs have a reclining mechanism. If you ever leaned back too far in an old office chair with four wheels, you would find out the hard way that four isn't enough. It's very easy to lean back comfortably and not realize you've reached the tipping point, fall back and hit your head on the floor or have a close call.
My first jobs long ago had four-wheeled office chairs, so you can guess how I found this out.
The fifth wheel goes a long way to preventing this danger.
You're much less likely to be leaning back in a regular four-legged chair so the front legs come off the ground, and if you do you'll probably be more aware that you are doing something outside the chair's normal mode of use.
And even if offices go out of style, office chairs will likely be around long past then.
The Lindy effect talks about the rare cases where this isn't true.
Absent other observations and/or priors, the best estimate of your expected waiting time is the amount of time you have already waited.
So if you've been waiting 10 minutes for something to arrive, your best estimate of how much longer you have to wait is 10 minutes.
If you've been waiting 10 years for a tech to become outdated, your best estimate for how much longer it will take is 10 years.
People usually use buses as an example. So it makes sense: if the bus is supposed to come every few minutes, and it hasn't come in the last 15 minutes, then odds are something is wrong thus increasing the prob that the additional wait will also be 15 minutes.
It's the 2nd sentence in the article. So not sure using examples of perishables shows it is a terrible heuristic.
It applies to ideas/cultures/technologies.
I was mostly pointing this out because a lot of people in the comments seem to be talking about this as if it's some kind of universal law, or a proposed universal law, when really this applies to only exceptional circumstances.
I'm less sure about this one, because of the relative difficulties of replacement. You can replace someone's POTS line with VOIP and they'll likely never notice (and this is underway). They'll notice if you take your fax machine.
The question is if fax on VoIP is still fax in that sense. At least the wikipedia article on fax mentions transmission through audio-frequency tones [1]. However if you count fax over VoIP as fax, I guess you should also count phone on VoIP as "landline".
I was in a radiology startup for a bit, and getting people to fill out forms on something like an iPad is still a problem. You need staff able to help them, and people damage or try to steal them. So then you end up with paperwork, and if that paperwork needs to move somewhere else, people fax it.
This even had the slight benefit over sending email to a random address because a fax can just be posted on a common board in the office space, rather than someone having to take the step of printing the email first.
If you already KNOW that Trinitron displays are gone, then there's no uncertainty. The Lindy effect is a heuristic for making decisions under uncertainty.
The relevant situation is if you have two things that still exist, and you want to guess which one will last longer. This doesn't override other facts about the domain -- it's SOME information in the absence of any other knowledge. It's for poker players, not scientists.
The example I gave was the new cloud blog startup vs. the old hosting platform. Which one would you put your blog on if you wanted people to read it 5 years from now? All other things being equal, I'd take the old hosting platform. But if you think the startup has a really good business model or you like the founders, maybe you choose that one. It's just common sense.
Another example might be cold-blooded crocodiles vs. a warm-blooded mouse as an example. All things being equal, you could guess that the crocodiles will survive further into the future, since they were here first. But someone with a specific theory or expertise could also argue that the bigger animal is less likely to survive, etc.
Similarly, we already know that dinosaurs are gone. This isn't a situation where you need to act or make a prediction.
Someone who understands Bayesian statistics can probably explain it better than me, but you have to take into account existing knowledge, and update it with new knowledge. Picking out something that you know is obsolete isn't relevant.
This article is a little different -- "things my son would use" implies that they're still popular, not just extant. Both questions are interesting, and influenced by the same principles.
The Lindy effect is one reason I'm working on https://www.oilshell.org/, because shell is now more than 50 year old, much older than Python/JS/Ruby, etc.
Concrete example from the last few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746280
i.e. When people want to explain a modern cloud platform, they use shell. Go would have been more obvious, but shell is clearer. Lindy prediction: shell will outlive Go :)
For example nobody expects the 2004 Toyota Carolla to be forever but the gas powered car will be far harder to kill.
Trinitrons are still to this day the best tech for displaying old games, and people will pay over $100 for even a consumer-grade unit without SCART.
For the professional grade PVM and BVM monitors, people will pay thousands for a large (21"+) one and they sell like hotcakes.
"The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New York, where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where ... they conduct post-mortems on recent show business 'action'"."
And no more should be read into that. There are solutions to problems which are adequate, e.g. "chair", where further changes can be expected to be modest. And since the problem isn't going away (unless someday we're told that sitting kills us and that we need to stand or lay instead), the solution won't either.
Otoh, there are technologies which simply supersede and obsolete others. E.g. UTF8 has ASCII as subset and hence I don't expect to see the latter around for long.
It could have gone the other way: if UTF-16 was the ONLY encoding, then ASCII would be obsolete. But that didn't happen.
ASCII is utf8, but it’s not utf16. ASCII will be around for as long as utf8 is.
Well, barely. I’d bet on JavaScript for this one; programming languages are almost immortal once they reach the popularity of JS, while HTML would be easier to replace.
What truly causes a technology to die is when it's kept a secret and all those who know the secret pass away without passing it on (Greek fire, ancient Babylonian batteries, Roman stainless steel). It's the one good argument for having a patent system, to keep that knowledge from being lost.
As for ripping out the physical service entirely, I don't have any numbers but I saw the lists from 2020 and 2021 and they are huge. So it is clearly happening. And they have been doing this for quite a few years.
If you mean landlines for Phones: The fiber can handle that, and does, but people are indeed dropping their telephone-number-for-a-house subscription in favor of individual cell phones (and my Phone is generally on WLAN-call when I'm at home, so it use the fiber as well). My parents in law were the last ones I knew with a house-based phone number and they dropped it this year. That said, I think you still get a house-telephone-number for free with many internet subscriptions and the ISP's modems have ports for Phones on them, so indeed the landlines as defined still exists, but it's a matter of definition.
Do you have a source for this? All I can find is this quote [0], which is a long way off from "all landlines":
> nearly 1 in 2 homes in the 25 largest cities will have KPN FTTH access by the end of 2021.
[0] https://glasvezelnieuws.blogspot.com/2021/04/kpn-op-schema-m...
This doesn't make any sense because it maps trivially to "any technology still around will last forever."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future.
That is, it's NOT the case that every piece of technology lasts roughly the same amount of time, and then is replaced.
For example, a chair vs. an iPhone. Which one will be used further into the future? Almost certainly a chair.
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Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines (both in the article), so they will likely outlive fax machines.
Will HTML or JavaScript last longer? Probably HTML, since it came first.
What about ASCII or HTML? Probably ASCII.
These have a "dependency stack" issue, but it applies regardless. And I think that is part of the phenomenon -- low level technologies that are widely adopted take longer to go away. Plumbing, electrical (AC vs DC), land lines, TCP/IP, BIOS, etc.
I can't find a link now, but there was a recent Kevin Kelly article about finding farming tools from a catalog in the 1800's still in use. I think he said that almost EVERY one was still in use, or able to be purchased, which is a nice illustration of the point. It takes a long time for old tech to die, and arguably it never does.