5 ms·

There were people toiling in the golden era of the Space Race doing menial things of no lasting value as well. The idea that some people have of the best minds

There were people toiling in the golden era of the Space Race doing menial things of no lasting value as well. The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly. It's like some people pretend that no one is working on space ships, sustainable energy, electric cars, extending the human lifespan, genetic engineering, quantum computing, memristors, real-time communications platforms to remove national boundaries, etc, all of the stuff that is actually changing the world and is actually happening right now. We're not in a dark age. If anything we're in the brightest age we've ever been in. So much cool shit is happening, so much groundbreaking and future-shaping research is occurring, and the very nature of what it means to be human is evolving faster now than it has in thousands of years... and the coolest thing about it is, so much is happening that people are able to forget about it. People are able to set aside the idea that they're holding the entire world in their hand, wirelessly, with chips as powerful as the most powerful desktops running silently, obeying their every command as they connect to the World Wide Web and complain to everyone around the globe that we must surely be in a dark age because we don't have government-sponsored space shuttles anymore. And that communication may very well be bounced off a satellite placed into orbit by a private company with a launch that is so commonplace that it's not even announced on TV anymore. Dark age indeed.

skookumchuck 8y ago
Being able to find an answer to any question by talking to a device in my pocket - pretty incredible! Being able to talk to anyone in the world thru a device in my pocket - pretty incredible!
- bigiain 8y ago
  Being tracked to resolution of about a meter anywhere on the planet by 3rd parties collecting the data for marketing - pretty, ummm, something... Being able to have my conversations remotely listened to by pretty much any nation state with a few million to spend with zero-day-phone-"forensics"-vendor-de-jour - pretty, ummm, something... :sigh:
  - RangerScience 8y ago
    The debate is whether or not that's a good thing, not whether or not it's incredible. Because it definitely is an incredible feat.
int_19h 8y ago
And yet our infrastructure is literally crumbling - and repairs often take longer than it originally took to build the thing being repaired.
- amself 8y ago
  What you build in a short time, without consideration of future repairs, will arguably take a lot of time to repair.
- borkt 8y ago
  and cost orders of magnitude more, and have a shortage of labor
- hire_charts 8y ago
  Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away. That's just the nature of the modern era - that we rely on such projects for far longer than the original engineers could've imagined speaks to both their and our ingenuity. Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    >That's just the nature of the modern era I dont know... Japan, Korea and Taiwan can build roads and public transit far better than they do it at home in Boston... And for a fraction of the cost.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      We have wars to fight so no nice roads for you.
  - tsukikage 8y ago
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
I love this view. I googled "memristors" but still don't understand what I'm reading. Could anyone breakdown what those are, and why they might be world changing for a non technical audience?
- pjc50 8y ago
  Something of a pipedream, but they promise the speed of DRAM with the retention and density of Flash memory. They've been predicted for years but never quite made it.
  - schoen 8y ago
    There's apparently an ongoing controversy in EE literature about the best way to understand these devices (which also seems to imply a controversy about whether or not they'll be particularly commercially useful in the future). There's been a lot of HN discussion about different articles that predict a huge commercial importance for memristors—or that say that they're not very useful or not very interesting! https://hn.algolia.com/?query=memristor&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=memristor&sort=byPopularity&pr...
- cr0sh 8y ago
  If you are interested in memristors, look also into an earlier form of similar nature, called "memistors", as well the hardware ANNs developed called "ADALINE" and "MADALINE". Dig around (wikipedia is a good start) - you can find enough information on how to build a memistor and play with it yourself.
baybal2 8y ago
> The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly. It is silly, but still true, and not only because there is "no money for big science" The amount of research being done went up 20 fold since the golden age, but there were nothing close to repeating the monumental feats of 20th century like the Green Revolution, 5 successful complete disease eradication programs, complete public education coverage, panpopulational vaccination programmes, and on and on...
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  What's more ephemeral than an ad? What do ads cost our culture, in their creation and in the time wasted viewing them? A seldom-addressed question for something which has somehow become so predominant.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Those ads represent something though. They represent a product someone built. An ad, is a manifested from the creation of a thing. Ads are the result of someone creating value— the ads themselves may not be intrinsically valuable, but they represent something that is. We have more ads because we have more stuff to sell. Lamenting ads is lamenting the very things we have produced. Ads are a symptom of a successful economy. Not much advertising happening in North Korea, not much value being created there either.
    - gbear605 8y ago
      Many negative things are symptoms of our successes. For instance, there wouldn't be drunk drivers if cars had never been invented, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have cars!
    - staticautomatic 8y ago
      The production of "stuff" is not inherently good.
    - jniedrauer 8y ago
bigiain 8y ago
> obeying their every command Obeying _who's_ every command? Disgruntled-tinpot-surveillance-state-of-Australia-resident...
deadwing0 8y ago
Thanks for this, fellow human. I needed some optimism today.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Being able to find an answer to any question by talking to a device in my pocket - pretty incredible! Being able to talk to anyone in the world thru a device in my pocket - pretty incredible!

bigiain 8y ago
Being tracked to resolution of about a meter anywhere on the planet by 3rd parties collecting the data for marketing - pretty, ummm, something... Being able to have my conversations remotely listened to by pretty much any nation state with a few million to spend with zero-day-phone-"forensics"-vendor-de-jour - pretty, ummm, something... :sigh:
- RangerScience 8y ago
  The debate is whether or not that's a good thing, not whether or not it's incredible. Because it definitely is an incredible feat.

int_19h 8y ago

And yet our infrastructure is literally crumbling - and repairs often take longer than it originally took to build the thing being repaired.

amself 8y ago
What you build in a short time, without consideration of future repairs, will arguably take a lot of time to repair.
borkt 8y ago
and cost orders of magnitude more, and have a shortage of labor
hire_charts 8y ago
Infrastructure requires a continual investment, which means that at any given time you can always point at something that is, quite literally, crumbling away. That's just the nature of the modern era - that we rely on such projects for far longer than the original engineers could've imagined speaks to both their and our ingenuity. Is there truth in the idea that repairs take longer? Sure. Sometimes it's due to incompetence and lack of funding. Other times it's for the same reason that software takes a lot more effort to maintain/refactor than it took to write in the first place. There's a lot of momentum you have to undo if you want to make an old thing new again.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  >That's just the nature of the modern era I dont know... Japan, Korea and Taiwan can build roads and public transit far better than they do it at home in Boston... And for a fraction of the cost.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    We have wars to fight so no nice roads for you.
- tsukikage 8y ago

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago

I love this view. I googled "memristors" but still don't understand what I'm reading. Could anyone breakdown what those are, and why they might be world changing for a non technical audience?

pjc50 8y ago
Something of a pipedream, but they promise the speed of DRAM with the retention and density of Flash memory. They've been predicted for years but never quite made it.
- schoen 8y ago
  There's apparently an ongoing controversy in EE literature about the best way to understand these devices (which also seems to imply a controversy about whether or not they'll be particularly commercially useful in the future). There's been a lot of HN discussion about different articles that predict a huge commercial importance for memristors—or that say that they're not very useful or not very interesting! https://hn.algolia.com/?query=memristor&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=memristor&sort=byPopularity&pr...
cr0sh 8y ago
If you are interested in memristors, look also into an earlier form of similar nature, called "memistors", as well the hardware ANNs developed called "ADALINE" and "MADALINE". Dig around (wikipedia is a good start) - you can find enough information on how to build a memistor and play with it yourself.

baybal2 8y ago

> The idea that some people have of the best minds of our generation being wasted just focusing on ads and APIs and worthless things is silly. It is silly, but still true, and not only because there is "no money for big science" The amount of research being done went up 20 fold since the golden age, but there were nothing close to repeating the monumental feats of 20th century like the Green Revolution, 5 successful complete disease eradication programs, complete public education coverage, panpopulational vaccination programmes, and on and on...

8bitsrule 8y ago
What's more ephemeral than an ad? What do ads cost our culture, in their creation and in the time wasted viewing them? A seldom-addressed question for something which has somehow become so predominant.
- briandear 8y ago
  Those ads represent something though. They represent a product someone built. An ad, is a manifested from the creation of a thing. Ads are the result of someone creating value— the ads themselves may not be intrinsically valuable, but they represent something that is. We have more ads because we have more stuff to sell. Lamenting ads is lamenting the very things we have produced. Ads are a symptom of a successful economy. Not much advertising happening in North Korea, not much value being created there either.
  - gbear605 8y ago
    Many negative things are symptoms of our successes. For instance, there wouldn't be drunk drivers if cars had never been invented, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have cars!
  - staticautomatic 8y ago
    The production of "stuff" is not inherently good.
  - jniedrauer 8y ago

bigiain 8y ago

> obeying their every command Obeying _who's_ every command? Disgruntled-tinpot-surveillance-state-of-Australia-resident...

deadwing0 8y ago

Thanks for this, fellow human. I needed some optimism today.