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>but it's unnecessarily derogatory to call something that significant "junk." By now, it certainly is. Back then it was probably state of the art. That's the c

>but it's unnecessarily derogatory to call something that significant "junk." By now, it certainly is. Back then it was probably state of the art. That's the cycle of computing. If I called an original Atari junk, some would take it as "this is useless" but most would take it as "this is useless now".

xeromal 6y ago
I'll start calling my grandpa junk too.
- geofft 6y ago
  Your grandpa isn't particularly functionally different in design from new humans being produced today, just at a different stage of his life. Also, he's a human. Let's take some non-human examples for comparison. Just about every good military strategy produced when your grandpa was young is, objectively, junk when compared to the state of war today. But just about every good piece of music still holds up - it might be different from good music produced today, but it's not worse. Your grandpa probably did mathematics with the help of books of log tables and books of mathematical instruction. The former are thoroughly junk, being at best as useful as a calculator (or calculator app) but much heavier, and at worst bearing typos; the latter are every bit as useful now as they were back then. Describing something from a previous generation as "junk" does not convey the belief it is old - there's a perfectly good term for that, "old." It conveys the belief that it is junk.
13of40 6y ago
I recall reading something in the 90s where in the 70s, Huffman coding was considered mathematically optimal compression and the whole field stagnated for a while because they thought they'd reached a fundamental limit.
- kaba0 6y ago
  “Huffman's original algorithm is optimal for a symbol-by-symbol coding with a known input probability distribution, i.e., separately encoding unrelated symbols in such a data stream” -wikipedia So being pedantic, it is optimal in this specific meaning, but I don’t know about this stagnation.
WoodenChair 6y ago
> If I called an original Atari junk, some would take it as "this is useless" but most would take it as "this is useless now". I think you have that backwards. "junk" is an insulting word. If you called an Atari junk, most would understand you to be disparaging it in a roundabout way, not making a temporal point. To be fair to OP he did at least call it "ancient junk." But there's no need to add "junk." "old" or "ancient" more than ably would have made the point.
- sodality2 6y ago
  I suppose that's down to cultural differences. I'd consider junk to be not useful anymore (I call my core2 duo junk but it was a powerhouse when I got it), but maybe a better word is defunct? According to dictionary, junk = Cheap, shoddy, or worthless.

xeromal 6y ago

I'll start calling my grandpa junk too.

geofft 6y ago
Your grandpa isn't particularly functionally different in design from new humans being produced today, just at a different stage of his life. Also, he's a human. Let's take some non-human examples for comparison. Just about every good military strategy produced when your grandpa was young is, objectively, junk when compared to the state of war today. But just about every good piece of music still holds up - it might be different from good music produced today, but it's not worse. Your grandpa probably did mathematics with the help of books of log tables and books of mathematical instruction. The former are thoroughly junk, being at best as useful as a calculator (or calculator app) but much heavier, and at worst bearing typos; the latter are every bit as useful now as they were back then. Describing something from a previous generation as "junk" does not convey the belief it is old - there's a perfectly good term for that, "old." It conveys the belief that it is junk.

13of40 6y ago

I recall reading something in the 90s where in the 70s, Huffman coding was considered mathematically optimal compression and the whole field stagnated for a while because they thought they'd reached a fundamental limit.

kaba0 6y ago
“Huffman's original algorithm is optimal for a symbol-by-symbol coding with a known input probability distribution, i.e., separately encoding unrelated symbols in such a data stream” -wikipedia So being pedantic, it is optimal in this specific meaning, but I don’t know about this stagnation.

WoodenChair 6y ago

> If I called an original Atari junk, some would take it as "this is useless" but most would take it as "this is useless now". I think you have that backwards. "junk" is an insulting word. If you called an Atari junk, most would understand you to be disparaging it in a roundabout way, not making a temporal point. To be fair to OP he did at least call it "ancient junk." But there's no need to add "junk." "old" or "ancient" more than ably would have made the point.

sodality2 6y ago
I suppose that's down to cultural differences. I'd consider junk to be not useful anymore (I call my core2 duo junk but it was a powerhouse when I got it), but maybe a better word is defunct? According to dictionary, junk = Cheap, shoddy, or worthless.