5 ms·

Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be br

Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

bcrosby95 5y ago
The interconnectedness of the bronze age was amazing. To make bronze required combining metals sourced from thousands of miles away from eachother. In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.
codethief 5y ago
Even for reasons other than Rome's history, this is one of the best talks I've ever seen. IMO every software engineer should watch it and I recommend it to colleagues all the time.
thoughtsimple 5y ago
He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio. All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents. Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Microsoft is not a legitimate standard of comparison. Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.
- xmprt 5y ago
  I think software will never feel like it's improved because as technology improves and changes, new features will be expected of software and so while some parts of software improve, other new parts will bring down the average quality. It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
- hattmall 5y ago
  The BSOD is kind of actually the opposite in reality. The software is worse, the hardware is better, so we are running more software to containerize those bugs. Software is more buggy and bloated than in the past it's just that the failures are silent and we don't have to reboot the entire system we just reboot pieces.
  - ido 5y ago
    win 9x was absolutely worse and a lot less stable than the NT lineage (that we're currently in). classic macos was absolutely worse and less stable than the NeXTSTEP lineage we're currently in. I used linux for the first time in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2 and it was an absolute pain to get working/install and a lot of hardware was unsupported. At least it didn't crash as much as windows 9x!
WalterBright 5y ago
The lack of writing probably impaired things greatly. I know the Romans had writing. But did they ever write manuals? It was not like Gutenberg's printing press, which put progress on a steep upward trend.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  For professions that requires formal education, certainly. There were manuals/“handbooks” for doctors and philosophers. Plinys “Natural History” contained detailed geographic information, but was considered a work of history (surprise, surprise).
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Not sure what you have in mind with "manuals", but I believe there were treatises on every subject, e.g. Vitruvius' On architecture (~20BC), "a guide for building projects. As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory, as well as a major source on the canon of classical architecture. It contains a variety of information on Greek and Roman buildings, as well as prescriptions for the planning and design of military camps, cities, and structures both large (aqueducts, buildings, baths, harbours) and small (machines, measuring devices, instruments)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura Ptolemy (100-170AD) wrote treatises on many subjects, and his works on astronomy and geography "never ceased to be copied or commented upon, both in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy Vegetius wrote a military manual On military matters, extremely influential until about 1500. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius Apicius wrote On the Subject of Cooking, a cook book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius (So much ancient writing hasn't survived, e.g. none of Aristotle's many writings survived - what we know as his writings are just his students' lecture notes.)
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The fact that any books would have to be copied by hand would disastrously limit their spread and influence. How many people could learn calculus if only 5 copies of the textbook were created? So many being lost is an inevitable consequence of very very few copies ever existing.

bcrosby95 5y ago

The interconnectedness of the bronze age was amazing. To make bronze required combining metals sourced from thousands of miles away from eachother. In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.

codethief 5y ago

Even for reasons other than Rome's history, this is one of the best talks I've ever seen. IMO every software engineer should watch it and I recommend it to colleagues all the time.

thoughtsimple 5y ago

He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio. All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents. Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.

ncmncm 5y ago
Microsoft is not a legitimate standard of comparison. Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.
xmprt 5y ago
I think software will never feel like it's improved because as technology improves and changes, new features will be expected of software and so while some parts of software improve, other new parts will bring down the average quality. It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
hattmall 5y ago
The BSOD is kind of actually the opposite in reality. The software is worse, the hardware is better, so we are running more software to containerize those bugs. Software is more buggy and bloated than in the past it's just that the failures are silent and we don't have to reboot the entire system we just reboot pieces.
- ido 5y ago
  win 9x was absolutely worse and a lot less stable than the NT lineage (that we're currently in). classic macos was absolutely worse and less stable than the NeXTSTEP lineage we're currently in. I used linux for the first time in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2 and it was an absolute pain to get working/install and a lot of hardware was unsupported. At least it didn't crash as much as windows 9x!

WalterBright 5y ago

The lack of writing probably impaired things greatly. I know the Romans had writing. But did they ever write manuals? It was not like Gutenberg's printing press, which put progress on a steep upward trend.

pyuser583 5y ago
For professions that requires formal education, certainly. There were manuals/“handbooks” for doctors and philosophers. Plinys “Natural History” contained detailed geographic information, but was considered a work of history (surprise, surprise).
yesenadam 5y ago
Not sure what you have in mind with "manuals", but I believe there were treatises on every subject, e.g. Vitruvius' On architecture (~20BC), "a guide for building projects. As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory, as well as a major source on the canon of classical architecture. It contains a variety of information on Greek and Roman buildings, as well as prescriptions for the planning and design of military camps, cities, and structures both large (aqueducts, buildings, baths, harbours) and small (machines, measuring devices, instruments)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura Ptolemy (100-170AD) wrote treatises on many subjects, and his works on astronomy and geography "never ceased to be copied or commented upon, both in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy Vegetius wrote a military manual On military matters, extremely influential until about 1500. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius Apicius wrote On the Subject of Cooking, a cook book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius (So much ancient writing hasn't survived, e.g. none of Aristotle's many writings survived - what we know as his writings are just his students' lecture notes.)
- WalterBright 5y ago
  The fact that any books would have to be copied by hand would disastrously limit their spread and influence. How many people could learn calculus if only 5 copies of the textbook were created? So many being lost is an inevitable consequence of very very few copies ever existing.