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Taleb talks about the Lindy effect and some of the surprises in this article can be explained it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikiped
by chubot 6y ago
Taleb talks about the Lindy effect and some of the surprises in this article can be explained it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect 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.
- d_silin 6y agoIt is an interesting observation to compare longevity times for current widely-used IT tech: 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
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThe iPhone was definitely not the first smart phone.
- Zak 6y agoNor was the Powerbook the first laptop nor the IBM PC the first PC. Those are all, however arguably responsible for popularizing the technologies in something resembling their current form.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- selfhoster11 6y agoI disagree. I am of the opinion that those form factors were inevitable, and would have come along anyway with or without Apple's offerings.
- ghaff 6y agoHow is that inconsistent with the parent statement? Even if the form factors were inevitable--e.g. someone would have decided that smartphones didn't need a physical keyboard--someone had to be first to popularize. (Not sure I agree on the laptop but the iPhone pretty clearly popularized the modern smartphone form factor.)
- selfhoster11 6y agoTo say they are "responsible" for something can be read as "allowed to take credit for". Being the first to popularize something is a business achievement, which is quite meaningless compared to the technical achievement of being the first to build something.
- Miraste 6y agoI can see this in the case of the PC and the laptop, but proto-smartphones were around for years before the iPhone and they were not developing in an iPhone-like direction. Every iPhone-like product that came after was the result of copying. I don't think it was inevitable at all.
- ghaff 6y agoOne thing I do think is true is that Apple developed sufficient brand permission to be able to do things that were definitely outside of a lot of buyers' comfort zone and arguably needed some iteration to really nail. 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.
- Sargos 6y agoNo, but it was the first wide spread smartphone and the first one most people used. This is the only practical starting point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- theodric 6y agoBlackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile phones were more widespread than you're giving them credit for, as were laptops considerably preceding Apple's PowerBook series.
- cookiengineer 6y agoThe mindblowing part about these kind of numbers for me always is the sheer amount of smartphones out there. 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.
- pjc50 6y agoSmartphones are a huge productivity tool, that's why they took off in the first place. Especially Blackberry, which offered the magic technology of accessing your email and calendar from anywhere. The ads are not an obstacle to this, especially not on iPhone.
- LASR 6y agoThey are far more than that. For a large number of people, the smartphone is their first and only computing device. Enabling internet access is like rocket fuel for advancing socioeconomic conditions for those in developing nations. Entire generations have been lifted from poverty due to it.
- usrusr 6y agoAnd "first and only computing device" pales to insignificance next to "first and only bank account" which they also are, in a way. That's huge.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoIts still a poor version of the internet when compared to a PC (laptop/Desktop).
- selfhoster11 6y agoI don't know about you, but a consumption-only "first and only computing device" sounds incredibly dystopian. I get that they have a positive impact, but it feels like we could be doing better.
- josephg 6y ago> C programming language will be 50 years old next year. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thanhhaimai 6y agoI'm more worried my grandchildren will still be learning/using QWERTY than they have to learn C's weird quirks :). My opinion is that it's easier to get a group of tech people together and gradually replace C (like Android Rust development) than getting people to replace QWERTY or getting the US to move to Metrics system.
- hattmall 6y agowhat's wrong with qwerty?
- drewzero1 6y agoArguments could be made that it's inefficient or un-ergonomic, though I'm doubtful how much difference it makes on a modern keyboard. There's an oft-repeated story about the qwerty layout being designed to keep people from typing fast enough to jam typewriters. I can't speak to the legitimacy of the story, but I do collect typewriters and I can say for sure that there's a lot more pressure and key travel (and time!) required to slam a type bar into the ribbon than is needed to press a modern keyboard key. 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.
- 6y ago
- heavyset_go 6y agoLaptops existed far before the Powerbook.
- rsynnott 6y agoIt really depends on how you define laptop. There was this sort of thing in the 80s, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_T1100), of course. And there were a couple of laptop-shaped laptops from 1988 on, but they were either spectacularly compromised (the NEC Ultralite had a max of 2MB of storage, for instance) or spectacularly expensive or both. In terms of laptops that were shaped like laptops as we know them, and that were actually usable outside of very specialized applications, the Powerbook 100 and Thinkpad 700T could be reasonably claimed to be about the first.
- thinkmassive 6y agoThere’s also the TRS-80 Model 100, launched in 1983
- selfhoster11 6y ago> Laptops (since first Apple Powerbook) - 30 years. 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).
- ghaff 6y agoThe Grid Compass was probably the first true laptop in 1982. But it ran a proprietary operating system by default and costs about $8,000 in 1982 money. The Data General-One came out in 1984 and might be a better candidate. But neither of those were really mainstream.
- thinkmassive 6y agoDon’t neglect the Model 100... “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.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
- ghaff 6y agoIt wasn't a laptop in the modern sense though.
- thinkmassive 6y agoFor any reason other than it doesn't fold in half?
- rzzzt 6y agoWhere are the Trinitron displays and ICs made with 1 µm process?
- chubot 6y agoIt's a heuristic. Although I bet you can find those things in use somewhere. 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/ 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 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 :)
- michaelmrose 6y agoI think you can argue that its not true for things in which item A and item B are members of a broader class of things wherein changing from A -> B incurs no or trivial costs or little fundamental changes in fulfilling the purpose of the class of items and there exists no immediate need to stop using A. For example nobody expects the 2004 Toyota Carolla to be forever but the gas powered car will be far harder to kill.
- wiml 6y agoBig CRTs are pretty much gone as far as I know, but 1-micron ICs are all over the place. They're just not interesting any more.
- AussieWog93 6y agoI run a retro games business. 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.
- chubot 6y ago
- guenthert 6y ago> The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future. "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.
- chubot 6y agoThat example proves the point. If UTF-8 exists then ASCII will exist. It could have gone the other way: if UTF-16 was the ONLY encoding, then ASCII would be obsolete. But that didn't happen.
- rusk 6y agoUTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII “as she is spake” but not strictly speaking ASCII as any ASCII control characters will break UTF-8. It also breaks any 8-but extensions/code pages. ASCII vs HTML is a bad example though because HTML is used globally and although ASCII is too this is more a historical artefact. It’s not hard to imagine ASCII dying out over the next few years while HTML continues to adapt to every encoding under the sun and pure ASCII becomes used less and less ...
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThe C1 block isn't ASCII. UTF8 is a perfect superset of 7-bit ASCII.
- rusk 6y agoNope. If you read an ASCII file with control characters in Java you’ll get an exception. Also it won’t work with the 8-bit ASCII variants. Neither are “true Scotsmen” of course, but the point still stands that HTML could yet be more durable.
- flatline 6y agoA nit, the telephone and fax machine developed more or leas in parallel, and the first working fax predated the first telephone by 11 years!
- techbio 6y agoThis message is a telegram.
- RugnirViking 6y agoInteresting! Could you expand a little on what you did?
- philistine 6y agoThey were sending drawings through telegram lines for newspapers during the American Civil War. Thus, the fax is older than the phone. But in terms of general population use, of course most people encountered a phone before they encountered a fax.
- r3trohack3r 6y agoSource?
- theodric 6y agoGoogle "fax machine history." This is incredibly trivial to verify.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aksss 6y agoInterestingly, you can still send a telegram.. https://www.itelegram.com/ https://www.itelegram.com/ I guess these guys took over all the telegram infrastructure of Western Union in 2006.
- typon 6y agoEvery time someone brings up the Lindy effect I can't help but roll my eyes. It should be replaced with "Survivorship bias". Almost every technology that humans used that lasted for a long time and no longer used has disappeared and is no longer in used, tautologically. The Lindy effect just seems to be a list of examples of cherry-picked technologies.
- TaupeRanger 6y agoBased on your eye rolls and subsequent "explanation", it's clear that you don't understand the Lindy Effect. It's not about listing examples of things that have been around for a while. It's about predicting the likelihood that something will continue to be around given how long it has already been around. This effect is well studied and just a cursory glance at the Wikipedia page will give you some solid sources for more rigorous understanding.
- cbozeman 6y agoThere are no "solid sources" there. Its a bunch of books and articles. 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.
- bo1024 6y agoI think the difference is that survivorship bias applies when the difference between winners and losers is mostly due to chance. I don't think the fact that we use 4-legged chairs and not 5-legged is survivorship bias. I believe the Lindy effect's prediction that 4-legged chairs will be around a long time. Of course, whether it's survivorship or not is case-by-case.
- nayuki 6y agoBut every standard office chair with wheels is 5-legged.
- julienfr112 6y agoIs ASCII really stîll âlîve ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hyakosm 6y agoASCII is still alive in UTF-8 and other extended encoding systems. :)
- Ekaros 6y agoI wonder if there is any systems using 7-bit ascii in production... Or extended code pages...
- lanstin 6y agoEBCDIC is still in use in production.
- woliveirajr 6y agoBase64 for the win....
- birdyrooster 6y agoLet’s apply this to the future: so just like fiber came before 5G so we are going to lay way more fiber after 5G fizzles out.
- agumonkey 6y agoI guess time averages the satisfaction humans have around a thing. Fads come and go and attracts towards new sensations but over time.. that old thing might be the only one that has the right blend.
- xwolfi 6y agoThis logic makes me fear for the metric system
- _carbyau_ 6y agoI curse the Imperialists every time I come across the cursed measurements.
- crooked-v 6y agoWhen can we expect horse-drawn carriages to replace automobiles again, then?
- majewsky 6y agoIt's a heuristic. A single counterargument does not disprove it. It just shows that it's not a law, which was obvious to begin with.
- csomar 6y agoIt's the same thing. horse-drawn carriages are automobile. Today's car is a more advanced version. In a sense, today's laptop is a spaceship comparing to the first laptop.
- pixl97 6y agoWhen? If we experience a civilisation collapse.
- philwelch 6y ago> Will HTML or JavaScript last longer? Probably HTML, since it came first. 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.
- taneq 6y ago> The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future. This doesn't make any sense because it maps trivially to "any technology still around will last forever."
- edanm 6y agoThis might be obvious, but... the reason we have a special name for things that behave that way (Lindy effect) is because this is usually a terrible heuristic. Most things are "perishable", as the article puts it - past a certain age, the older a human is, the shorter their life expectancy. This is true of most things. The Lindy effect talks about the rare cases where this isn't true.
- ramblerman 6y ago> The Lindy effect applies to "non-perishable" items 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.
- edanm 6y agoWell yes, but not only. I think there are examples where it applies to living organisms too. E.g. a few hundred years ago, a human who lived past the age of 5 would be more likely to grow to be 40, afaik. 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.
- mellavora 6y agoIt is just a natural case of the exponential distribution, which is widely used to model expected waiting time. I wouldn't call it 'rare'. 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.
- qwerty456127 6y agoFax machines seem long extinct everywhere except in Japan and in some hotels. Landlines probably only survive in business environments, I hardly know anybody who would have and use a landline at home. Also, both businesses and consumers mostly use VoIP-based "landlines" employing codecs which can't support fax.
- sverhagen 6y agoMy employer was moving us to a new office, right before the pandemic, it's not seen much action, but... there's a fax machine. I doubt any of us would use it, but it comes with our corporate really estate package. Just in case you need to send a fax to Japan... or some hotel?
- qwerty456127 6y agoPerhaps. Whatever, it sounds comforting and fun. I've heard they have a colour (!) fax machine at almost every home Japan. If I moved into an office which had one, I would actually contact somebody there and have fun sending hand drawn pictures to each other :-)
- cmg 6y ago15 years ago, the office I worked in received daily menus via fax from local delis and restaurants with their specials, in case we wanted to get lunch. I have no idea if this is still a common practice but it seemed to be at the time. 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.
- ghaff 6y agoLandlines are probably more common than you think. I only got rid of mine last year. I would have kept it for backup but it just cost more than I was willing to pay. Many of us don't get great cell reception and WiFi assist isn't always perfect.
- justusthane 6y agoFax machines are still widely used in healthcare, at least in the U.S. Can't speak for other countries, but I'd be surprised if that weren't also the case elsewhere.
- crubier 6y agoWow, given the answers to that thread, it seems that the HN crowd has either no notion of conditional probabilities or that their “future is better” mindset is clouding their rational judgement. 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.
- RHSman2 6y agoHumans.
- pkdpic_y9k 6y agohumans...
- EliRivers 6y agoThis field also seems to attract (or foster) a particular mindset that we might call "I am smart and hyper-rational", which then adds an additional set of blinkers and an enhanced ability to discard and ignore evidence, and an enhanced faith in one's own powers of deduction. All people have that skill, of course, but this field seems to have more than its fair share of such.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago> Wow, given the answers to that thread, it seems that the HN crowd has either no notion of conditional probabilities or that their “future is better” mindset is clouding their rational judgement. 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?
- crubier 6y ago
- sandos 6y agoLand lines are mostly gone where I live, Sweden. I don't really know anyone who uses then, of course they do still exist due to some alarm systems and so on. 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.
- teekert 6y agoWhere I live (the Netherlands) all landlines (copper) have been replaced by fiber, I still call them landlines. I guess OP does too? 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.
- tremon 6y agoWhere I live (the Netherlands) all landlines (copper) have been replaced by fiber 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-met-glasvezel.html https://glasvezelnieuws.blogspot.com/2021/04/kpn-op-schema-m...
- teekert 6y agoMaybe I should have specified, "in my city", indeed, when the concentration of people drops, people are still on copper or on satellite or other wireless alternatives. The point is, the country is investing in fiber: Landlines. Allthough this may change when we blanked the country with 5G towers. Already I have 60/60 mbit in my home via 4G, approaching my current 100/100 fiber subscription. Not sure which is going to scale better in the future.
- hyperpallium2 6y agoCalculus will die before algebra, will die before geometry.
- rapnie 6y agoA sextant (1731) vs. GPS (1973, fully operational 1993). Most large ships still have sextants as backup.
- greedo 6y agoAnd the US Navy, after a hiatus has started training officers and crew on how to use a sextant since modern warfare will probably result in GPS being either jammed to oblivion or shot down.
- rsynnott 6y ago> Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines (both in the article), so they will likely outlive fax machines. 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.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoI haven't used fax for at least 15 years. Might be 20, anyway so long ago that I can't remember when it was.
- carlmr 6y ago>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". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
- michaelbrave 6y agoTechnologies never truly die due to outdatedness they just become rare. Horse buggies are still used, though rarely, steam engines are more hobbies now but still around. 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.