5 ms·

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNz

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

tome 5y ago
The part of the interview before this is great too but I've never been able to find it again. All the clips I can find are just this segment.
noduerme 5y ago
Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited in ancient Greece. The problem is even if you had thousands of people at your disposal in the bronze age, how would you start building one from raw materials? I know, this all sounds like an old guy rant. The thing is, society has so quickly started taking these things for granted in my own lifetime - as Louis CK points out - it's unsafe. It's terrifying what would happen if they even had to reinvent one generation of knowledge.
- ryanianian 5y ago
  That's a pessimistic interpretation. By contrast, the amazing is now mundane because there other things that are now more amazing and more novel. I have degrees in math and computer science from good schools, but I would struggle to reinvent basic trigonometry. I don't think we've "lost knowledge" so much as shifted our emphasis to the novel. I teach Python to 6th graders. These 12-year-olds consider basic coding knowledge akin to algebra. One of the "popular kids" (himself above the 'nerd stuff') is making a little Android app using a public-school-provided chromebook. The lever of utility (and thus focus) has shifted. It doesn't mean a net loss of knowledge or ability.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    That's fair, and overall it's a good thing. I'm not saying I can forge a sword or build a CPU or write an operating system in Assembly. The first language I learned was BASIC, when I was about 7, and after that they showed me Logo in school, moving the turtle around. So since I had a sense of how to turn pixels on and off with arrays and make fireworks, that seemed pretty ridiculous and easy. But even then, Hypercard blew my mind. And I was able to build things on it that I would never understand the low-level nature of. I'm not saying everyone needs to build every tool they use by starting with a piece of rock. But knowing how things are made and how they work is really important. If python is the new algebra, great! The thing is, someone needs to be able to fix the instrument if it's broken. Like, this is extreme, but I drive a car that's a simple machine. I can open the hood and know what I'm looking at, and if something is wrong I have a good idea what it is. But I can't make a piston or a fuel injector. I have to rely on people with plant investment, tooling, machines, to keep molding parts. They rely on people who have to forge the steel or iron. The forges rely on people who mine the raw material. The end consumer knowing roughly how that works is what separates us as a society from a cargo cult. I don't think we can ever successfully separate ourselves from the roots of our technology or the lower layers of it. Anyway, if you're a curious 12-year-old coding in python you should wonder - how does this magic work! I was about that age when someone explained Assembly to me, and though I would never try to write something that way, just seeing it and understanding how it was moving bits around in memory to handle the higher level languages I was writing, blew my mind. I suddenly understood a lot more about what I was doing when I said "print $f"
jdthedisciple 5y ago
Pure Gold! Never seen it before

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

tome 5y ago

The part of the interview before this is great too but I've never been able to find it again. All the clips I can find are just this segment.

noduerme 5y ago

Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited in ancient Greece. The problem is even if you had thousands of people at your disposal in the bronze age, how would you start building one from raw materials? I know, this all sounds like an old guy rant. The thing is, society has so quickly started taking these things for granted in my own lifetime - as Louis CK points out - it's unsafe. It's terrifying what would happen if they even had to reinvent one generation of knowledge.

ryanianian 5y ago
That's a pessimistic interpretation. By contrast, the amazing is now mundane because there other things that are now more amazing and more novel. I have degrees in math and computer science from good schools, but I would struggle to reinvent basic trigonometry. I don't think we've "lost knowledge" so much as shifted our emphasis to the novel. I teach Python to 6th graders. These 12-year-olds consider basic coding knowledge akin to algebra. One of the "popular kids" (himself above the 'nerd stuff') is making a little Android app using a public-school-provided chromebook. The lever of utility (and thus focus) has shifted. It doesn't mean a net loss of knowledge or ability.
- noduerme 5y ago
  That's fair, and overall it's a good thing. I'm not saying I can forge a sword or build a CPU or write an operating system in Assembly. The first language I learned was BASIC, when I was about 7, and after that they showed me Logo in school, moving the turtle around. So since I had a sense of how to turn pixels on and off with arrays and make fireworks, that seemed pretty ridiculous and easy. But even then, Hypercard blew my mind. And I was able to build things on it that I would never understand the low-level nature of. I'm not saying everyone needs to build every tool they use by starting with a piece of rock. But knowing how things are made and how they work is really important. If python is the new algebra, great! The thing is, someone needs to be able to fix the instrument if it's broken. Like, this is extreme, but I drive a car that's a simple machine. I can open the hood and know what I'm looking at, and if something is wrong I have a good idea what it is. But I can't make a piston or a fuel injector. I have to rely on people with plant investment, tooling, machines, to keep molding parts. They rely on people who have to forge the steel or iron. The forges rely on people who mine the raw material. The end consumer knowing roughly how that works is what separates us as a society from a cargo cult. I don't think we can ever successfully separate ourselves from the roots of our technology or the lower layers of it. Anyway, if you're a curious 12-year-old coding in python you should wonder - how does this magic work! I was about that age when someone explained Assembly to me, and though I would never try to write something that way, just seeing it and understanding how it was moving bits around in memory to handle the higher level languages I was writing, blew my mind. I suddenly understood a lot more about what I was doing when I said "print $f"

jdthedisciple 5y ago

Pure Gold! Never seen it before