drblast

Enshittification is definitely real, but let's not look at the past with rose-colored glasses. A lot of things you can buy today are vastly superior to things available 50 years ago.

It used to be remarkable to drive a car 100k miles without major repairs. Volvo dealerships in the 80's and 90's would give you a badge at 100k milestones to advertise how reliable their cars were compared to others.

Anything tech related is just light years ahead of what it used to be, and for far cheaper. 65"+ OLED TVs for less than a couple grand are pretty much science fiction come to life. Gaming consoles are super-computers compared to an NES.

For many appliances, if you pay an inflation-adjusted cost for what a 1980's family would pay you can get something that will last forever. Last year I bought a commercial microwave for about $300 that has a single dial, hardly any features, and likely will last longer than the first microwave my family owned and also paid ~$300 for. Adjusting for inflation my new microwave is vastly better and cheaper than my childhood one.

I play guitar - in 1954 a new Stratocaster sold for $249, which is about $3k in today's dollars. And $249 today will get you a guitar that's easily as good as most 1954 Strats. If you spend the inflation-adjusted equivalent you're in ultra-luxury territory.

Want good furniture? That's ALWAYS been expensive, but you'd typically buy a table for the equivalent of $5k in today's dollars and expect it to last a lifetime. You can spend $5k on real wood furniture today, but nobody does.

Housing materials are much better and cheaper with the possible exception of copper pipes and anything made of real wood. Certainly builders of McMansions are cutting corners at every opportunity, but if you do your own building/finishing these days a lot of materials are available that will outlast their 1980's equivalent, and the cheap options are better.

I think a lot of this is a lack of perspective - everyone wants better things but nobody actually wants to pay for it.

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Benjamin: Yes, sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Benjamin: Yes, I am.

Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

---

I love this scene because it so perfectly captures what it's like to be young and given advice, however well-meaning, by an older generation living in a world that no longer exists for the young. And it's ambiguous and trite enough to be essentially useless even if the underlying idea isn't terrible.

I did some amount of research into the feasibility of PHE and FHE about 20 years ago, and my conclusion at the time was that the space overhead of the encrypted output was a massive bottleneck, which meant that while it was potentially useful in a small number of niche cases it wasn't ever going to be practical for general-purpose computations without a major breakthrough.

The gist was I could do an encrypted (int)x + (int)y = (int)z computation, I could encrypt the inputs and then get a result back that was correct, secure, and decryptable, but was like 1MB in size.

So, for someone whose knowledge is 20 years outdated and is about Pallier crypto, has that major breakthrough happened?

I often imagine WWIII, as I witness the bombs coming down to destroy everything we've built, wondering, "what conveniences would I give up for this not to be happening?"

And I also realize that this is more than a thought experiment for many people living right now.

In the 80's, many, many people looked down on electronic and synthesized music because it wasn't real music played with real instruments.

And now it's just another instrument and has whole genres of music dedicated to it. C64 SID chips are sought after for 8-bit music creation because it has a unique aesthetic. Same with TR-808 drum machines.

The AI complaints feel a lot like that.

I'm betting in about 15-20 years there's going to be a revival of terrible AI images and videos because people are nostalgic for 2024 when AI images were obvious and sit firmly in an uncanny valley.

And I think AI will inspire a massive artistic revolution, both because it becomes just another tool in the toolbox that makes creation easier like drum machines and synths, AND it takes over the pop-music space previously occupied by boy bands and pop queens - generic rehashes of inoffensive crap that so saturates the market entire counter-cultures develop. But someone will use it to make something uniquely creative and new. Rap and hip-hop wouldn't exist without cheap drum machines.

In other words, you're old enough to start disliking new stuff, but not old enough to have seen this happen multiple times and realize that this is just another generational cycle. The younger generations will absorb AI tools and continue to do what humans have always done, which is be creative with the tools at their disposal.

Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.

The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.

This idea has been around as long as the web, but you can't get momentum behind it.

A much better idea was a .kids domain where the content was vetted, and you could allow-list your child's device to that. Much easier than trying to migrate everyone over to specific TLDs, especially when that ship has sailed already. But that never got traction either.

Edit to add: I used to work on "family safety" software. Blocking bad content doesn't work - it's too difficult of a problem. Walled gardens do work, however. The fact that there's not a push for the equivalent of an Apple App Store for kids is probably evidence of ulterior motives on behalf of regulators.

I haven't tried this because I haven't played Magic in over 20 years, but I always thought it would be more fun if you had two draw decks where the second was only allowed to include basic lands.

Then in the draw phase you could choose which deck to draw from, eliminating the mana flood/drought possibility that ruins games.

Maybe some additional rules to limit how many lands you're allowed to draw in the initial draw to one or two, I dunno.

I never realized the extent to which The Children's Television Workshop must have been fueled by psychedelics.

But now Big Bird is making a whole lot more sense.

Travel to Oregon or any of the various places these things are legal.

Or produce the necessary items on your own. Growing things isn't difficult.

The value prop is the dissolution of your own ego.

We experience reality filtered through our senses and our own concept of "self," which is an incredibly limited view of the world. Imagine being able to see/experience a less filtered version of reality, if only for a short period of time.

Or imagine expanding the frequencies of visible light you can see. That alone could certainly be a catalyst to change your perspective on many things.

It's not so much "losing control" as it is "losing unconscious bias." Loss of control is not the goal.

It's also one of those things that you have to experience to understand, and even then, sober you won't completely understand.

But done right, these experiences can be incredibly important to people. If it's not for you, fine, but it's funny how many people with zero experience with these substances think there can't be anything worthwhile there.

It's interesting how everything is a balance abd experience and mastery count for a lot, but nobody acknowledges this in blog posts.

There is an appropriate amount of architecture and design that should go into systems. One aspect of that is how much effort you put into scalable design. Building and maintaining scalable systems isn't free, so the "right amount" is pretty much somewhere between "none" and "we are AWS."

Knowing when adding complexity is worth doing takes experience, humility, and maturity, the exact qualities that are sorely lacking in many egomaniac software developers.

It's why we get ridiculous fads and pendulum swings where people get fed up with bad design and then go do the opposite thing, having learned nothing.

Except sometimes you do fix it later.

Approve the PR when there's a bug/task filed to fix the thing later and then prioritize that work as necessary.

Just as bad as never fixing things later is never releasing anything until it's perfect, which it never is.

This seems like the first step to implementing personalized ads everywhere.

Opt out? You get the most annoying ones.

Imagine a star trek transporter was a real thing. In that show, I think the common explanation was that the transporter didn't send you places, but merely created a copy of you somewhere else and destroyed the original.

Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.

Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.

If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.

And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.

But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.

But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.

But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.

That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?

My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."

I think the article touches on that.

Because it's a one-time cost and you can cheaply throw more CPU power at the problem, or just wait and then you're done.

If you're doing this at such a scale that encoding speed matters (like if you're Instagram) the major concern would likely be cost, which you're going to save in bandwidth every time an image is viewed.

Having had these experiences, the god I saw and became one with was a being with a childlike sense of wonder at the universe it had accidentally created.

More of a "whoops, woah cool" than a "let there be light"

Very much unlike of the Christian conception of God.

I'm not describing this well, because I can't describe it well. But I can't imagine anyone experiencing something similar would be a jerk about it. See the universe unfiltered though the mind's perception and it just...is. Timeless and meaningless.

Consciousness and ego create their own meaning.

It's a better design, imo.

Have you ever wanted to write a command line executable and gotten hung up on I/o and parameter parsing?

With PowerShell you can write a cmdlet in C# as a PowerShell module and have strongly typed input and output parameters for free. It's a revelation.

As as scripting language, it's fine but for me the killer feature is being able to easily extend it in a non-scripting language.

This is so true, at least from my late 70's perspective. Star Wars didn't seem so much like fantasy when I saw it in the theater - it was more like the inevitable conclusion of where tech was going, and probably in my lifetime we'd be a spacefaring species.

Before Challenger, space flight seemed to be on a constantly improving trend. And likely it is, just on a much longer timeline than we supposed as kids.

Tech is similar - the advancements in the 80s-2000s in the computer industry felt much more revolutionary. I think that had a much larger impact than anything that's happened since.

The next revolution will likely be elsewhere like medicine.

I used to have this problem with our triage call center in India. I'm in the U.S. It was like pulling teeth trying to get to the point. Most annoying were the delays between pleasantries... You've interrupted what I was doing three times and then ghosted.

Them: hi

Me: Hello, how can I help you?

[Two minute wait]

Them: How are you?

Me: Great, what do you need?

[Ten minutes later]

Them: Do you have a few minutes?

Me: Am I on candid camera or something?

Or do away with performance reviews entirely. In my entire career I've never once seen a review cycle that was a net positive, and more often than not they cause the best performers who normally don't care about such things to become disgruntled and leave.

As a manager they create perverse incentives especially if you have a high performing team (which you want to have) that all deserves a promotion but a limited budget. The incentive is to keep that low performer around so you have the budget to promote the others.

It's a systematized way for management to shoot itself in the foot. But for whatever reason we think something must be wrong if we're not giving and getting report cards at the end of the year. Waste of time and counter-productive.

Now that you mention it...yes exactly that.

I've been making homemade pizza. I make a few every few days.

It started out pretty bad, but now it's delicious and my kids get excited to eat it - they think it's the best crust ever.

It's not the recipe at all, either. The technique makes all the difference, at least for the dough.

This is good advice.

Also, Windows is an excellent way to learn systems programming because the documentation and tooling is so good and things hardly ever change.

There is a wealth of documentation on MSDN for writing device drivers and such. And great tools for remote debugging so you can set up a VM in hyper-v and step through the code from the host system.

Do make sure if you're analyzing malware you do it in a VM on a machine you don't care about having to wipe, and isolate it from the rest of your network.

Joining the military might be an option for you if you're not ideologically opposed to it. Try air force, then navy. Not marines or army.

If you're halfway intelligent with technical skills you will find something to do for four years, then you'll have better options when you get out.

Probably better than being homeless.

Most of the time I've seen dependency inversion "so we can test" the code is littered with hundreds of single-implementation interfaces and no mocks, or stub mocks that are written just to pass the tests. It doesn't actually test anything.

In the case where there are mocks, the unit tests are almost always literally testing "can my programming language call a function and return a result" or "can we store data in a database if the database works?" They are functional tests disguised as unit tests, and are testing only non-production fake functionality.

Write functional code instead. Liberally use the compiler and the type system to make mistakes impossible instead of unit testing.

Unit tests are for when you can't express something in a way where the compiler and type system will save you from errors.

Everything else is a functional or integration test and should be testing the production system, not a mockup of the production system that works differently.

Basically, write Haskell programs in whatever language you're working in. Use unit tests as a backstop for when the type system isn't as good as Haskell's.

I just miss Milky Way Dark ice cream bars, raspberry schweppes ginger ale, and Jell-O 123. I can't understand how these things aren't still widely available.

The industry is cyclical and to be forward thinking all you have to do is describe what's already happened and assume it will happen again. ;-)

The things being done with JavaScript today are not new, nor is the idea that a server and client would coordinate to run interactive apps. That fundamental concept has been reimplemented in many different ways until we've landed on the current rube goldbergian monstrosity that are web apps.

It shows that the desire to have users interact with a service in particular ways will not go away. The technology used to do that is mostly irrelevant.

Yeah I think for Trump to win washington state, he'd have to do something to appeal to voters there in a way that would likely cause his red state base to abandon him.

The negative correlation makes sense when we think about how difficult it is for everyone in Washington to suddenly turn conservative and everyone in Mississippi to turn liberal. Much more likely is that the crazy thing is that the candidate or circumstances changed in some way.

It makes more sense if we ask...if a candidate wins NJ what is the chance they also won AK?

I think in many ways it's impossible to have this discussion with a U.S. audience.

The idea of force and violence being the solution to everything is deeply, deeply ingrained in U,S, culture. Simply suggesting that reason and cooperation can solve some of the problems we in the U.S. attempt to solve with more violence is usually met with the "starship troopers" ideology that violence is the actual source of legitimacy of all government.

And we do treat everything this way. We have a problem and declare war on it. War on drugs, war on poverty, war on obesity. That might sound like a tongue-in-cheek way to state a problem is serious, but consider that mindset an entire culture must have to make "war" be the perpetually used shorthand for the ultimate solution to every social problem.

And a large portion of the U.S. apparently has no concept of a social contract and a sense of cooperative action or "doing my part."

It's like violence and force is the only tool we have in the U.S. so every social ill is met with the further application of it, way beyond what is reasonable.

And it seems to be a one way trip. You can never suggest that we have gone too far. Apparently there can never be too many police, too much military spending, or too many people in prison. They only right answer is more of that, please.

We are teetering on the precipice of complete authoritarianism because of our culture and it's scary.