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Programming in the Apocalypse

• sinenomine 4y ago
  Ctrl+F geoengineering: 0 hits Come on, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering it entered mainstream just recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-geoengineering.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/climate-change-ge... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet-earth-climate-crisis-geoengineering https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/planet... https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoengineering-and-why-should-you-care-climate-change-harvard/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/09/615/what-is-geoe... By now one question should remain: why was the very idea of geoengineering silenced for decades behind sneers and activism and bad press, when we could implement it half a century ago and avert much of the climate change?
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    This person is assuming the problem will occur, and thinking about what their type of work will look like under those conditions. So, it is less interesting of an article if you want to hear about attempts to innovate around the whole problem.
  • warning26 4y ago
    OP sort of addresses this in the end: > a startup isn't going to fix everything and capture all the carbon
  • slavboj 4y ago
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dividedbyzero 4y ago
    I think the general consensus is that we've proven to be complete and absolute rubbish when it comes to predicting how vast complex real-world systems that we can't read worth a damn behave when we put them under major stresses, and the vast majority of attempts to hack ecosystems have been disasters, meaning that we're just as likely to make things even worse if we try to apply our crude means and models to make planet-scale modifications to climate and biosphere.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I think that was the basis for Snowpiercer.
    • cyber_kinetist 4y ago
      We are already putting major stress to the environment, so we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to better understand and control climate. The problem is that changing the earth’s climate can only be done at a global scale, so this is a project where every country needs to cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each other… (which I don’t think will happen soon enough)
    • jcoq 4y ago
      Nearly all of the disastrous things we've done to the planet were understood to have negative environmental consequences and yet we did them anyhow. Meanwhile, a great deal of our environmental interventions have been incredibly successful. So I'm totally unconvinced by this often recited and rarely supported mantra.
      • dividedbyzero 4y ago
        Some people may have understood, or rather suspected. They weren't in the majority though, or lots of misguided geoengineering wouldn't have been done the way it was. Clearing forests has been progress thing until relatively recently, draining swamps was a totally great thing until even more recently, straightening rivers into concrete beds has been considered progress up into my lifetime. All of these things have had lots of bad downstream consequences to the point that lots of places now spend huge sums to undo at least some of these developments. And come to think of it, wildfire management is another geoengineering effort that lots of very dry places totally screwed up (e.g. California, as discussed frequently on this very site) out of the very best intentions, but working with broken models. Plenty of times species have been introduced overseas to control other species, and it's always been a disaster, to the great surprise of everyone involved, time and again. Dams for hydro power are still considered ultra low ecological footprint power generation by lots of people, even though they form barriers that can completely disrupt river ecosystems to the point of leaving desolate wastelands in the riverbed downstream, disrupt riverside ecosystems downstream that depend on regular floods, allow for excessive water extraction and so on. Hunting predators to extinction is still widely popular, even though ecosystems without predators can't and don't function. I've had conversations with local people who're hellbent on exterminating the few remaining local beavers because they damage trees; but beavers are a keystone species, tons of species depend on beaver-created clearings. The list doesn't end: Dumping toxic waste into rivers has been considered harmless until toxins accumulated to levels extreme enough to severely hurt people, by which point some of the worst-polluted rivers had been pretty m much sterilized (e.g. the lower Rhine). It's hard do believe this today, but people did honestly think nature would take care of the gunk, filter it out or dilute it or whatever. We pumped lead into the environment by means of leaded gasoline, one of the craziest "accidental" geoengineering adventures to date, until whole forests started dying, and of course some people saw that one coming, but then some people saw the world end when the LHC went online, and good thing we didn't listen to those people. When I grew up, climate change was widely considered a crazy myth; some saw it coming early on, the majority had a good chuckle; yet that's the biggest geohacking fuck-up in all our history, and it took us that long to realize the fact that climate change is real. Generally speaking, with experiments like this, the true consequences tend to not become visible until way down the line, at which point cleanup may be impossible (e.g. climate change, the current mass extinction) so we need to anticipate such things and get it right the first try. Yet we've historically both failed to build non-rubbish models and then to heed those few warnings we did get. Convenience and progress and growth seem to always trump the naysayers, and often that's just fine – the world didn't end when the LHC went online and we learned a lot about the fundamentals of physics. Good thing we didn't listen to them. But all this history leaves me personally highly pessimistic when it comes to more planet-scale climate hacking, given that we don't even understand the downstream consequences of our past and current climate hacking and given that our track record of getting this sort of thing right on the first (or any) try is so grotesquely bad. We're great at problem-solving short-term, everyday issues with near-immediate feedback loops, like by mass-producing crazy good tools; we're bad when things get big, abstract, long-term, with long-ish feedback cycles e.g. when building nuclear reactors that don't malfunction in major ways, because we start making bad compromises and take shortcuts even though we should and do know better, because we socially can't help doing this; and we're sad failures at anything extremely large-scale, extremely long-term, extremely long feedback cycle-ish, like climate change or – planet-scale climate engineering. Since we are bound to get pretty desperate and since climate hacking does offer an enticingly quick way out, I'm confident we'll try it at some point. When we do, I very much hope I'll find my pessimism proven wrong. Edit: fixed formatting
  • kossTKR 4y ago
    There's no profit incentive to geoengineer or clean up anything so nothing will get fixed - at least not if the future will be a continuation of how capitalism, industry and geopolitics have worked literally forever - probably also biological and even physical systems if we extrapolate. It's always boom then bust, everywhere in space and time. That said i still hope we'll manage in some obscure way because we have no other choice!
    • paulbaumgart 4y ago
      This is probably true at the level of corporations, but not clearly the case at the level of countries. An interesting paper on the economics of geoengineering, if you’re curious: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18622
  • skyfaller 4y ago
    I think this is a decent and brief response to why geoengineering is a bad idea: https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ https://www.geoengineeringmonitor.org/reasons-to-oppose/ The most convincing argument to me is that we're already facing a vast problem that would require a great deal of geoengineering to counter. If polluters realized they could geoengineer the problem away, they would stop trying to reduce emissions, and the geoengineering problem would become even larger and more unmanageable. Due to how entropy works, it's always more efficient to simply not spill milk on the floor than to mop it up. Deciding that you should just have a milk bottle fight because you have a mop in the house is... strange? It will never be more efficient to scrub greenhouse gases from the air than to avoid emitting them in the first place.
    • jcoq 4y ago
      That argument is totally unconvincing... like saying not to treat some lung cancer because the patient will just smoke more.
      • CM30 4y ago
        Agreed. It also makes me feel like some people want there to be no 'easy' solutions to problems, because they despise how society is going and wish it would be forced to change. I suspect they'd still be unhappy even if there was a magic wand you could wave that would instantly fix climate change (or make it impossible to occur).
    • paulbaumgart 4y ago
      For a more balanced view, I highly recommend this talk from one of the leading minds in the field: https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929 https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/1039929
    • poulpy123 4y ago
      I agree that geoengineering is a bad idea but they use the "white men" bogeyman, that's really stupid. And also they don't really talk about to price to pay for degrowth
  • legutierr 4y ago
    By geoengineering, you mean blocking out the light of the sun? Won't that significantly reduce the photosynthetic potential of Earth, and significantly reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for life? There are plenty of planets and moons that are cooler because they receive less sunlight. None of them host any life that we can detect. Isn't there a real risk that geoengineering would just end up turning the Earth into something resembling Mars, irreversibly? The Earth has supported abundant life with an atmosphere with a higher concentration of C02 than it has now. Has it ever supported abundant life with the solar energy being reduced to the extent required to reduce climate change?
    • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      It's not an exact measurement of incoming solar energy, but the Earth has supported abundant life through a much wider range of climate variation than anything we're facing today. I don't know of any evidence that we're in a climate "sweet spot" where we'd need to worry about something like that. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...)
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    Because "solar geoengineering" is a joke. Why wait all the time until global warming destabilizes every ecosystem on Earth? You can have it today, just by spraying the upper atmosphere! People do take geoengineering quite seriously. People do talk seriously about carbon capture, about ecosystem husbandry, about forced forestation, even about ocean seeding (there have been enough research about this one to conclude we are not desperate enough yet). It's only global shading that isn't serious.
  • realo 4y ago
    Well… IMHO trying to solve our climate change issues with geoengineering seems similar to the USA trying solve their gun issues by putting even more guns in circulation. Does not fix the root causes and I don’t see how it can work long-term.
    • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      And that's an entirely reasonable stance that as far as I can tell is the consensus among climate researchers. But it logically implies that the narrative of climate apocalypse is not true - that nature is capable of self-balancing within the parameters industrial civilization throws at it, and that our current climate trajectory is mild enough that it's not worth pursuing some potential solutions if their side effects look too serious.
  • jcoq 4y ago
    Climate change has turned into a sort of quasi-religious moral issue that blends with other issues of our day. The thinking goes that, if only we could become pure and stop partaking in the evils of consumer capitalism, we might appease a hidden power and be saved from a myriad of bogeyman such as climate change. This mindset fails to reasonably consider the certainty and enormity of the threat. Organized civilization is likely to end. Billions will die and we might very well become extinct. The problem must be attacked with the full force of human intellect. It's so damn obvious that "wait for everyone to become super duper conscientious" is a fool's plan.
  • poulpy123 4y ago
    Anthropic global warming is by definition geoengineering. We are not controlling it, what makes you think that we can control other geoengineerings techniques ?
• ajuc 4y ago
  I doubt global warming will negatively affect amount of time spent on open source/programming language design. Currently we're wasting a lot of time on social media, Netflix, games, etc. There's lots of fat to cut. Also historically bad conditions were when people wrote books and focused on studies. If OS is important - it will develop. On the other hand x as a service and cloud based stuff will likely die off. Good riddance.
  • poulpy123 4y ago
    Economical collapse will affect how much free time people can donate to open source. Paying open source (like Linux kernel) will not be more impacted that closed source but the rest yes
    • ajuc 4y ago
      Economic collapse can just as easily mean more free time. The relationship isn't linear nor straightforward. For example substinence farming leaves you A LOT of free time, just provides very little surplus and you risk starvation.
• black_puppydog 4y ago
  So... anyone else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic things going on around the world people will keep their appetite for mindless distraction and will still be able/willing to one-click buy random stuff on a whim? When they might have to expect waiting weeks for the delivery, and/or pay humongous transport fees? Asking because that seems to be what much of modern IT is angling for and why there's so much money in it.
  • warning26 4y ago
    > else having doubts that with all the apocalyptic things going on around the world people will keep their appetite for mindless distraction and will still be able/willing to one-click buy random stuff on a whim Wouldn't people in the described apocalyptic scenario want mindless distraction? Anything to keep their minds off the, well, apocalyptic things going on.
    • k0k0r0 4y ago
      That's true until people are suddenly hungry odr thirsty. Hunger or thrist will force them to act. And not necesserily nicely.
      • throwaway4aday 4y ago
        Exactly, mindless distraction is only an option when you are comfortable. Try not eating for a day + turning off your heating/cooling and see how interesting Twitter is then.
        • m3talsmith 4y ago
          Mindless distraction is exactly what you turn to when your efforts to better your life become too monumental to bear: lifespans shorten because destitution drives people to apathy or an open desire for suicide.
          • throwaway4aday 4y ago
• kristjank 4y ago
  'Bit sad innit, but what can I do about it except globally irrelevant feel-goods that we're conditioned into doing on the individual basis? Cheap, clean energy solves a lot of the problems described, and until we get people to understand that the only energy that can be produced on a low budget, with little impact to the environment is either hydro or atomic, we are going to be a long way from a long-term solution or even remediation. Wind and solar are also extremely promising, but the load put on network balancing, storage and conversion makes me sceptical of their performance under unreliable conditions.
• derbOac 4y ago
  I think the basic idea is to cross energy use of a language with ubiquity of existing deployments. So take energy use benchmarks from things like this https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21.pdf https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks and cross it with popularity? https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages/
• paulsutter 4y ago
  There are two better explanations than the Great Filter: - Dark Forest theory is popular in China, that civilizations should conceal their existence to prevent being destroyed by a more advanced civilization - Our own high power TV and Radio transmitters will be shutdown soon in favor of fiber optics. Even better communication mechanisms should be no surprise
  • kossTKR 4y ago
    Interesting! I've always had an intuitive feeling that theories like The Great Filter theory was a pretty arrogant simplification of "actual reality" beyond our narrow biological lenses and even narrower western definition of "life" or even spatial dimensions and time. Just because some western scientist with only 350+ years of somewhat advanced tools, math and imagination can't see "something" doesn't mean something isn't there - we don't even know what "there" is, or who "we" are. Math and science is an awesome "thing", but the ridiculous existential pop-science extrapolations from simple equations is laughable if not sinister, especially in light of the paradigmatic shifts in science and worldview over just the last couple of centuries.
    • snikeris 4y ago
      The Drake equation handles that case: fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
      • poulpy123 4y ago
        The drake equation handle nothing, because all parameters are pure speculation
      • yesbabyyes 4y ago
        Right; the parameter that would be of interest is rather L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space. Quoting Wikipedia: "Inserting the above minimum numbers into the equation gives a minimum N of 20. Inserting the maximum numbers gives a maximum of 50,000,000. Drake states that given the uncertainties, the original meeting concluded that N ≈ L, and there were probably between 1000 and 100,000,000 planets with civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy." As I understand it, at the time it was estimated that a civilization would broadcast during its existence, from the time radio communications started until the fall of civilization (thus the Great Filter). Now, from our sample size of one, it looks like L would rather be on the order of 100 years (in our case, not because we are trying to hide in the Dark Forest, but because we don't want to waste energy beaming Dallas reruns into space for no good reason).
• skyfaller 4y ago
  I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. The lives of billions hang in the balance, and even if some will inevitably suffer and die, we can't just throw up our hands and let everyone die. Climate change mitigation, cutting emissions as quickly and thoroughly as we can, must remain a priority for the rest of our lives, even if we can no longer reach the best/safest scenarios. Every little bit of avoided global heating matters. - This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today. It's not just your users/audience who might be computing from a shitty mobile phone in a refugee camp, it could be you. Don't forget that we're not only dealing with climate change, but with the reaction of other people to climate change: they might want to kill you for your water. And heatwaves are predictable in India/Pakistan, but look at the freak heatwaves in Canada recently, nowhere on Earth is safe, the climate crisis is a global problem. - Why are we programming what we're programming? Shouldn't our activities and their purposes change given the dramatic change in circumstances? Isn't there something wrong with the system that produced this result, the impending destruction of the biosphere that supports us? Fighting valiantly to preserve the functionality that is killing the world may not be a wise or ethical use of your time. (And if you're programming something for a fossil fuel company, now is a good time to reconsider.)
  • mcculley 4y ago
    > human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
• formvoltron 4y ago
  At some point, we'll have to put a fine dust in the upper atmosphere. We seem to have most of the building blocks already for renewable energy. Just need to focus on it and assemble them together... and decide it's worth giving up fossil fuel related things that are still functional.
  • k0k0r0 4y ago
    As someone else put it nicely: People seem to rather fight the sun than capitalism.
    • potemkin_buster 4y ago
      The main problem is that shit is to cheap
  • mmcgaha 4y ago
    Dust in the upper atmosphere? That is a solved problem; we can just burn more coal. Of course the world will be dirty and it will get cold everywhere, but hey at least we will be back to where we were in the early 20th century. I have a better idea how about we consume less and not spew crap into our environment.
  • mellavora 4y ago
    "But we do know it was us that scorched the sky."
  • digitalsushi 4y ago
    We need some sort of a dust to touch up the oceans a bit, too. Maybe one that can tidy up the plastic and the acid.
• luxuryballs 4y ago
  “we have to accept immense hits to the global economy and the resulting poverty, suffering and impact. The scope of the change required is staggering. We've never done something like this” This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global leadership please know that it didn’t have to be this way and somebody is taking advantage of all of us for power and control.
  • boppo1 4y ago
    Yeah this narrative is troubling. I’ve read stuff from IPCC contributors who compare climate change to Covid, especially in the case of people living in the first world. Things will get harder and the shape of our lives will change, but “civilizational collapse” is a term from people gleefully imagining the end of the world like they would a zombie apocalypse.
    • balaji1 4y ago
      this article has bought into a lot of narratives of doomsaying and the "real" causes of it. It complains about coal consumption in India and China, conveniently linked to a reuters article. > With China and India not even starting the process of coal draw-down yet... It is fine to assume the Global South is trending towards further coal usage. Maybe the developed world can help them transition to something sustainable like nuclear power. There has to be an element of truth in Michael Moore's extreme Planet of the Humans. At least Amazon's Eating our way to Extinction [1] makes a convincing argument against deforestation and meat consumption trends. But the West is continuing to sell the global south a lifestyle (foreign to them) of extreme meat eating, among other unsustainable consumption lifestyle. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Our-Extinction-Kate-Winslet/dp/B09KJK9K6T https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Our-Extinction-Kate-Winslet/dp...
    • yanderekko 4y ago
      I don't think they're gleeful, they just deeply believe that we need to reject capitalism and/or embrace some sort of global technocratic governance, and see the threat of climate catastrophe as the most-plausible mechanism that such a change would come about.
• nostrademons 4y ago
  For me, the big story is going to be supply-chain breakup and de-globalization. The author touches on this a bit, but completely misses the implication. The programming languages that will best survive the apocalypse are the ones that can run on chips that best survive the apocalypse! I think that there're be a big turn toward highly-efficient compiled languages: Rust and Go are well-positioned for this, C will still be around, but languages like PHP and Ruby are very poorly suited for this. Anything that can be adapted to run on a microcontroller that you can scavenge from old cars that no longer can get gas will be in high demand. I also think we'll see a turn toward more local production of semiconductors, which may require moving back in process nodes toward older technology where the supply chain and manufacturing process isn't as complex. I don't think backwards-compatibility is as important as the author thinks it is. Enough other things are going to break in the economy that people will be willing to make due with software that gives them basic communication & computation abilities even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of modern software, particularly if modern software becomes completely unavailable due to infrastructure failures like cable lines coming down and there not being enough power to run datacenters. Final thoughts: I think distributed technologies like mesh networks, data synchronization algorithms, networking, (proof-of-stake/storage) blockchains, etc. will become significantly more important. I wouldn't count on the cloud surviving: it has a lot of physical infrastructure dependencies, and physical infrastructure is already crumbling. Software that you can run locally on a device and communicate over unreliable networks will become very important.
  • nyanpasu64 4y ago
    I could not imagine running rustc on a Rust program, let alone building a 200-crate dependency graph or all of rustc, on a 2000s car entertainment system microcontroller.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      What you are programming would change, just like what you're programming with would change. The projects who use 200-something crates are building desktop applications or something like that. What we'd program if we only have microcontrollers available, would be much smaller in scope, maybe a lot of focus on controlling physical infrastructure for agriculture and such.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > with all of us agreeing that C, C#, PHP were likely to survive in 2050 I agree, but I'll bet some folks' left eyes started twitching, when they read that... https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/6/68/Charles_Dreyfus.png/ https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/6/68/Charl...
• sb057 4y ago
  Relevant: the history of Warajevo, a ZX Spectrum emulator developed amidst the Siege of Sarajevo: https://worldofspectrum.net/warajevo/Story.html https://worldofspectrum.net/warajevo/Story.html
• LoveGracePeace 4y ago
  The word Apocalypse only appears once on that page, in the title. The page is pointless either way since the Apocolypse isn't here yet. People will know when it's here and there will still be a subset of people who will deny it. Like that cartoon of the dog casually sitting at the table while the house burns down around him, saying "This is fine.".
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  This was a meandering rant that went on so long I never even got to the point of the article before bailing.
• giamma 4y ago
  "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. They mostly nail these criteria and are well-designed for not relying on containers or other similar technology for basic testing and feature implementation. They are also (reasonably) tolerant of spotty internet presuming the environment has been set up ahead of time." Why is Clojure better then Java when it's a JVM language as well? It uses Java artefacts (Maven) so how is it more tolerant than Java of a spotty internet? Scala, Clojure, Java, Groovy should all rate pretty much the same or am I missing something?
• krona 4y ago
  The article seems to be using an inaccurate visualisation of a model (RCP8.5) which is now 'no longer plausible'[0]. RCP8.5 was considered the 'worst-case' scenario and projected 3.3 to 5.7 in 2100, not 2050 as the graphic shows. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51281986 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51281986
• nynx 4y ago
  It’s nice to submit to call of civilizational collapse every once in a while, but it’s not a realistic view. Yes, climate change is going to affect billions of people, but from what I can tell, things are moving in the right direction and we’re on track to avoid the worst even with barely any political action. If it was suddenly 2050 and none of our technology had improved, we’d be fucked. But it’s not a useful perspective to assume that technological progression will stop. Solar panels have dropped in price by literal orders of magnitude. It seems like nuclear is coming back into vogue. Space-based power seems like it might be economically viable in a few decades, even.
  • paulbaumgart 4y ago
    Yep. For anyone curious to learn more, here’s a good summary of this energy technology transition: https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/ https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/
  • moffkalast 4y ago
    > "Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go." I mean the guy may be delusional, but he's right on the climate part. Even if our tech improves and we cut carbon to zero in a fairytaleish fashion we're still up for a 3 deg temp increase till 2100 which will be rather catastrophic. Of course the developed world will be hit the least due to its location, so we'll likely be fine for the most part but it will be troubling time regardless. It all depends on cascading issues that we can't really predict, like warming causing some fish to go extinct that ate eggs of some insect that will now breed uncontrollably and push out useful pollinators from the ecosystem, leading to crop failure and such.
    • nynx 4y ago
      From the literature I’ve read, that doesn’t seem right. If we cut all emissions to zero by 2050, total temperature rise would be more like 2C afaik.
      • moffkalast 4y ago
• kingcharles 4y ago
  This article doesn't take into account any of the myriad advances in AI, which appears to be starting up an exponential curve of improvement. IMO, it is likely the Singularity will arrive before 2050 and make practically everything in this article completely moot.
• grej 4y ago
  >>> “On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this year.” <<< As an aside, seeing things like this in climate change articles always bothers me. FYI Asheville being minutes from the beach would imply a 650m+ (2000+ft) sea rise in the next 25 years. This kind of hyperbole makes it easy for people who deny climate change in totality to say it is based on absurd scenarios which will never happen. The real projections implications are significant enough. Why do people feel the need to resort to pure fiction?
  • dixego 4y ago
    Fiction is a tool used by humans to elicit, experience and process feelings under (mostly) safe circumstances. The details (such as how much the sea level would have to rise for this to be accurate) are not quite relevant; the point is to make the reader think about how they would feel if this sort of concern was just a commonplace consideration in their daily life. Is it not shocking? Uncomfortable? Sorta nihilism-inducing? In summary: doesn't it make you want to act towards preventing this from ever being close to happening?
    • cmdli 4y ago
      It only makes you want to act in the short term. In the long term, it either promotes denial (from those who think that its all hyperbole) or doomerism (from those who think that none of it is hyperbole). Hyperbole does not promote hope, which is the primary motivating factor to solving problems like this.
    • switchbak 4y ago
      I agree with the person above, too much hyperbole makes it easy to dismiss an argument. We're already struggling against a mountain of industry funded FUD, the last thing we need is people stretching the truth in well meaning yet counterproductive ways.
    • goatlover 4y ago
      It makes me want to question climate activism. I'd want to act to prevent or mitigate realistic scenarios (depending on the tradeoffs), not apocalyptic fictions.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  I don't really agree with 'collapse of human civilization; apocalyptic predictions due to fossil-fueled global warming, more like a rapid degradation in living standards for the vast majority of people on the planet, do to the known list of climate-related issues: decreases in agricultural production largely related to heat waves and drought, and infrastructure damage due to flooding and fires and extreme weather. This is likely to reduce the amount of arable land, and the intersection of that and continued human population growth is likely going to put pressure on populations to migrate to more livable zones, and that will create the kinds of tensions like to lead to widespread warfare and possibly even genocidal actions. Now, can some of this be technologically mitigated? Absolutely. It's entirely possible to run the global economy without fossil fuels. The major sources of replacement energy would be wind/solar/storage, and nuclear in some regions (massive expansion of nuclear is just not feasible, sorry enthusiasts, but that's the reality - there's not that much high-grade uranium ore around, breeder concepts are implausible, fusion is nowhere in sight, and the cost equation favors solar and wind in the vast majority of regions, from the equator descending polewards). However, that would upend the economic status quo in a remarkable way. All the petrostates that live off oil exports and oil production would have serious readjustments (and this is non-ideological, it's true for the USA, for Saudi Arabia, for Venezuela, for Russia, for Iran, etc.). Imagine if we got serious about eliminating fossil fuel use globally. Well, one obvious first step would be a ban on the international trade in fossil fuels, right? Who would agree to that? All the fossil fuel corporations I know of are planning on maintaining current levels of output for the next 30 years, as well. Regardless, we could very plausibly reduce fossil fuel production in the USA by 3% per year if we also increased solar/wind/storage by 3% per year, while maintaining most of the current nuclear fleet. Then, in 30 years, the USA would produce zero fossil fuels. It's entirely doable with existing technlogy, but would require as much investment as say, the military-industrial complex currently gets. As far as computer tech and programming, I really don't see that being fundamentally impacted; if there's an energy / material crunch then it will just become more expensive to buy a computer or run a datacenter, and it'll be more restricted to key uses (managing energy grids, running factories, etc.). However, running a chip production line off solar power is entirely feasible.
• dixego 4y ago
  > Just wanted to follow up on my note from a few days ago in case it got buried under all of those e-mails about the flood. I’m concerned about how the Eastern Seaboard being swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean is going to affect our Q4 numbers, so I’d like to get your eyes on the latest earnings figures ASAP. On the bright side, the Asheville branch is just a five-minute drive from the beach now, so the all-hands meeting should be a lot more fun this year. Silver linings! I... I don't think I'm psychologically prepared for tolerating the fauxptimism of corpospeak under the Slow Motion Apocalypse.
  • notpachet 4y ago
    UW;DR Underwater; didn't read
• verisimi 4y ago
  If there is an apocalypse, it looks entirely contrived to me. Spending untold billions to shut down the economy for most of 2 years is something I saw with my own eyes. Sea level rises, and whatever else, not at all. The dire predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al Gore)? And nothing.. I suspect its just a trick that means we hand over greater control and money to the worst of us (government). And if it were real, I have zero trust in any governance structure to do the right thing as opposed to serving itself and its 'stakeholders' (aka corporations).
  • koshergweilo 4y ago
    > dire predictions have been coming for decades (remember Al Gore)? And nothing. And I suppose you think that's it's just a coincidence that we're breaking all-time-high temperature records year over year isn't it?
    • verisimi 4y ago
      So we are told. If anything, the temperature seems cooler to me. But do you recollect the climategate scandal? Where historical temperature records were altered?
      • qgin 4y ago
        So because of the way temperatures seem to you subjectively, you're going to say there is a worldwide conspiracy of everyone who works on historical climate research to fudge the numbers?
        • verisimi 4y ago
          With climategate, we saw scientists falsifying the data. But you can't read about what happened on wikipedia - the entry there is an exercise in obfuscation. You can read some bits of the emails here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220517000832/https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climategate-2-0-new-e-mails-rock-the-global-warming-debate/?sh=76d866d127ba https://web.archive.org/web/20220517000832/https://www.forbe... - judge for yourself! What this tells me is that the science is highly politicised, and cannot be trusted. Too many people stand to make money and gain control from the purported threat. Al Gore is one of those. You should watch 'An Inconvenient Truth' from 2006 - it hasn't aged well. Should there be a punishment for people who shout fire in a crowded theatre? So, I have listened (and once believed) all the alarms over the years - they have not materialised. People talk about wildfires and flooding, but these are better explained by mismanagement, despite the media hype. So no, I don't trust the politicised science, nor the foghorn media. OTOH, I do see how an excuse of 'climate change' is valuable in handing even greater control to the governance structure, where they can micro-manage your usage of electricity, water, and even have the ability to turn it off. Do you think if they have that power they won't do it? And yes, despite all the talk of rising water levels, I have not seen it. I have been to beaches from my youth - the water levels are the same. Certainly there have been changes - and climate is not some consistent, clockwork thing - there are probable cycles and mega-cycles in there. The whole thing about climate changes, seems designed to be play on both our sense of importance (that we can really change the world, as if we were gods) and a self-indulgent saviour complex - we need to save the world from us. Its religious thinking to me, you feel sinful and are seeking atonement. I didn't think science was meant to work like that!
• paganel 4y ago
  • sodality2 4y ago
    Have you done any research about the impacts of climate change? Complaining about the urgency of warnings only works if you're certain the urgency is unwarranted.
    • motohagiography 4y ago
      Personally, I'm not against the planet or humanity, I'm against disingenously poor quality arguments designed as a chaff countermeasure to befog public discourse and facilitate a worlwide distration theft via technocratic policies and economic centralization.
• warvair 4y ago
  Maybe it's time to start putting the "Cloud" in orbit.
• waynecochran 4y ago
  Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute style machines.
  • rectang 4y ago
    "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" — John Backus, 1978 44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will happen in the next 28.
    • edgedetector 4y ago
      We've made a ton of progress. They didn't have decentralized computing at all in 1978. Now most things run on remote machines. Also, there has been a move away from the imperative style that makes parallelism so difficult.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • waynecochran 4y ago
      Probably not a complete break. But there needs to be paradigms that can allow for exacale computing. Instead of 20000 independent threads (e.g., SIMD / CUDA style) we will have trillions of threads that work in interleaved harmony. The von Neumann model break downs at that level.
  • wolfgang42 4y ago
    This isn’t nearly so clear-cut as you make it out to be—compilers today often treat “imperative” languages as declarative, and CPUs are a lot more sophisticated than “fetch-decode-execute” implies. (Yesterday I was looking at some code where GCC took a fairly complicated for-loop and turned it into about four assembly instructions, all with incomprehensible acronyms.) COBOL’s fall from grace was due in no small part to the syntax rather than the semantics, and I expect that trend to continue: I wouldn’t be surprised if the languages of 2050 are similar to the languages of today, just with more expressivity, better communication between compiler and programmer, and an even larger range of optimizations under the hood.
• 5d8767c68926 4y ago
  >Phones are going to be in service for a lot longer. We all felt that both Android, with their aggressive backwards compatibility... Come again?
• mav88 4y ago
  Lol. We're heading for a mini Ice Age which will peak around 2035. Get a wood stove if you live in the Northern Hemisphere.
  • doctorhandshake 4y ago
    Not according to NASA https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-impending-mini-ice-age/ https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/2953/there-is-no-i...
    • mav88 4y ago
      NASA has been tampering with its figures for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Rc301T-hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Rc301T-hY
      • doctorhandshake 4y ago
        Uhhh ... who is Tony Heller
        • mav88 4y ago
          Ah the good old genetic fallacy. As it so happens, he was a lead designer on the original PowerPC and received several awards for it. So a real engineer and scientist. After retiring he started investigating the fallacy of climate change. It's quite irrelevant who he is, it's what he has to say that's important and whether his facts are correct (which they are).
          • doctorhandshake 4y ago
            I don’t know about you but I’m not qualified to evaluate the enormous amount of evidence required to ascertain whether the globe is warming and so I’m inclined to believe almost all scientists rather than some kook on YouTube who basically doesn’t google. That’s the nature of considering the opinions of experts on subjects in which you’re not an expert.
• reggieband 4y ago
  I have fear that the cathartic pessimism we sometimes enjoy ironically is turning into a chronic fatalism. It's like a habit that has become an addiction. I think the author was in a discussion that started as a fun catharsis for all involved and then devolved into an addictive argument that the author felt they needed to win. There is a cliché which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the worst". Articles like this only seem to get the second half of that while clearly violating the first half. A well balanced response to crisis is benefited by both. I think the author is not actively aware of the importance of expecting the best, both of the world and of their colleagues. I feel their arguments are weak due to this imbalance.
  • KerrAvon 4y ago
    You want to provide a reason based in reality for that level of optimism at the present time? It seems like pessimism is currently warranted absent major upheavals that would change the political situation worldwide, which would bring their own issues.
    • thoms_a 4y ago
      Life on Earth has survived much, much worse than the burning of fossil fuels. For example, the K-Pg extinction event. It's all a matter of perspective. But humans are irrationally social creatures susceptible to memetics, so no amount of empirical evidence will alter socially beneficial memeplexes.
    • krona 4y ago
      2.5%[0] of the world GDP just doesn't sound very apocalyptic to most people. Especially when you factor in GDP growth projections over the next century. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
• madrox 4y ago
  The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. While people are a lot slower to buy into collective action and changing their way of life than I thought, society is far more robust than I expected. Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. With that in mind, I have some ideas on what programming will look like in 30 years: 1. New frameworks and abstractions for making apps even more disposable while maintaining privacy will come along. New languages will happen. Corporations that just finished moving to the cloud will now be moving to even greater abstractions like Airtable or whatever comes next. 2. Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries. This is a hunch and I’m only 60% confident of it happening. 3. Satellite internet will be more of a norm for no better reason than it’s the most efficient way to manage infrastructure. More rural communities will need it, and remote trends will continue. The cost of launches are going down and there’s a lot of land. 4. Everything will get more energy efficient, and most intense activity will be pushed to compute farms. 5. VR will once again come around as the next big revolution in computing, but will be ultimately disappointing and won’t see mass adoption. Beyond these ideas, I think too much plays into our personal optimism or pessimism. I think things will change, but we’re a scrappy species that will fight to preserve its way of life. It will look a lot like our global pandemic response…warts and all. There’s a lot there to be disappointed about, but it’s actually incredible it wasn’t worse. When these predictions hit I’ll be 70. I hope I’ll live to see it.
  • tasuki 4y ago
    > The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it. > Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse in the future.
    • boringg 4y ago
      Our response was actually what made it a much more insignificant blip (thanks public health + vaccines), and technically we aren't through it yet.
• agentultra 4y ago
  Consider also the support systems in place for agrarian production that enable programmers to do what we do. We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event. If we lose the eco systems that support us we’ll go into decline as surely as every other species as high on the food chain as we are. I’m not sure if civilization will collapse but it does seem like something that is probable. Do we have enough people with the expertise to maintain or build computing devices with limited access to fabrication? Can we still cobble together useful stuff from the piles of e-waste? One easy thing we can do is push for policies that make it easier to access public infrastructure. Low-cost access to the poles, towers, etc. Interesting times ahead.
• NeutralForest 4y ago
  I feel like this is impossible to mention the end of times™ without reading a bit about {100 rabbits}(https://100r.co/site/home.html https://100r.co/site/home.html) and their journey on a boat with small ecological impact in mind. A closely related read is of course {CollapseOS}(http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/), the OS written in Forth.
• peterweyand0 4y ago
  Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity. I don't see many hands.
  • keiferski 4y ago
    I think a lot of people would actually be willing to do some of this if, and only if, it came with a basic income.
  • mtinkerhess 4y ago
    I would be more than happy to give up almost everything if it would stop climate change, but unfortunately even if I make all those changes, everybody else will continue driving cars, so it seems my personal choices have nothing to do with whether global warming happens or not. The way around this is collective (government) action to guarantee everyone will participate, but for a variety of reasons we don't have the political will to make that happen. Besides, I'm not convinced individuals' actions are to blame for the majority of climate change -- I'm not an expert but I'm under the impression that corporate / industrial energy usage is the majority of the problem.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      what is the purpose of "corporate / industrial" energy usage if not ultimately to serve the needs of a consumer at the end of the supply chain?
      • arczyx 4y ago
        consumer's demand is indeed part of the problem, but the corporate/industrial's perpetual quest for growth is also part of it IMHO. if corporations are okay with not growing, planned obsolescence won't be a thing and we will also probably get less ads shoved on our face to trigger our impulse to buy.
  • vikinghckr 4y ago
• nixlim 4y ago
  Assuming all of the assumptions in that article come to pass, why ignore Elixir/Erlang as a viable option for language & infrastructure?
• gred 4y ago
  > Due to heat and power issues, it is likely that disruptions to home and office internet will be a much more common occurrence. As flooding and sea level rise disrupts commuting, working asynchronously is going to be the new norm. Nah. I expect simple UI fashion transitions (e.g. round corners to square corners back to round corners) are likely to claim more of our time and attention over the next 30 years than the "serious" predictions in the article.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• joshgev 4y ago
  I don't understand. In this article we are imaging widespread and frequent failure of critical infrastructure and we are supposed to further imagine that we're still interested in working on our relatively unimportant software? I suppose there are critical software systems out there, but they're already written so we don't really need to think about what languages they'll be work on with.
• bordercases 4y ago
  See also CollapseOS which was posted on HN awhile back, which articulates technology choices on the similar idea of resource constraints: http://collapseos.org/ http://collapseos.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  Needs more virtue signalling. Like, "Programming in a supply-chain-challenged world"
• HillBates 4y ago
  COMPILERS - just use LLVM. Why do we need 900 different compilers ? We can have every architecture, programming language covered. Less human resource wasted. Experiments and new approaches can be tried inside LLVM too.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• _hcuq 4y ago
  In the 1950s there were essentially no computers……. That’s where we’re headed first.
• thombles 4y ago
  I've been thinking about this recently and have a few tentative conclusions. - My government (.au) runs almost entirely on the MS cloud/productivity stack, as do most large businesses. This is the stuff that's going to get resources when there are outages, conflicts, or difficult decisions have to be made. Assuming a degradation over the next decade or two, you could do worse than align your business or personal computing with PCs and MS tech/services - by the time you're facing major outages there are probably bigger problems outside your window. Even in extended collapse downturns there will be some work available to keep this stuff ticking along for many years. - Intermittent connectivity is to be expected, but also the risk of suddenly losing access to some resource permanently, be that dependencies, documentation, software downloads, or your cloud data. At a minimum all cloud data you care about should have a full offline copy on local disk in a format that is usable. (This seems generally true of both Apple and MS cloud services, if you have a fully synced Mac or Windows PC with the right settings.) - Development environments with batteries-included standard libraries will offer the most bang-for-buck, which can be installed from offline installers. Being able to build custom GUI apps on demand for whatever hardware your customer has is very helpful. I think .NET MAUI is very interesting here, especially if they end up gaining Linux GUI support. Linux is a great way to bring old laptops into service. - When advanced technology manufacturing becomes too resource intensive and expensive for many people to buy, larger computers etc. will give way to phones, often crummy ones. Expect lots of Androids and hand-me-downs. - There will be good trade in second-hand hard drives and batteries that are not too worn. If you can bodge together USB powerpacks from scavenged batteries then certain kinds of USB-powered devices should be able to run for decades. Ultimately I expect old Android devices to be dominant platform because they are numerous, relatively inexpensive, hackable and portable. - If your value derives from what you have (hardware, stashes of offline data etc.) then expect it to be taken from you. Skills are more helpful - so long as they are actually useful in the computing environment of the time.
• _dain_ 4y ago
  >If we're all struggling to pay our rent and fill our cabinets with food, if there are actual famines than surely rents would go ... down?
• bo1024 4y ago
  Struck me as strange the discussion jumped straight to how things will be done, but not what things will be done. Surely the tools and workflows will depend on the tasks we are trying to accomplish at that time?
• jtwebman 4y ago
  2050 local first development will be the only way to go. No more servers but devices communicating via local networks with maybe some online backup at the most. It will be only offline mobile apps and web apps that will thrive.
• thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Virtually all of this is laughably stupid, but there's one thing buried in there that's true today: > Mobile will be the only computing people have access to and they'll need to be more aware of data pricing. For the vast majority of the planet, mobile is already the only computing they ever use. > There's no reason to think telecoms won't take advantage of their position to increase data prices under the guise of maintenance for the towers. This, though, is straight up wrong, since in any competitive market data prices becomes a commodity. In India you can get a 1 GB data plan for 15 rupees (~US$0.20) per month. Emphasis on the "competitive" bit there though: as usual, Canadians will be screwed.
• dr_mork 4y ago
  What about technological singularity, alternate power sources, starlink like projects, energy efficient appliances, etc? Also, China/India are in survival/growth mode, so "sustainability" is least of their concerns right now :( and btw resource consumption per person is higher in first-world countries, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumpt... . This is a mindset issue and needs to addressed as well. P.S. I am hopeful!
• lsdacid 4y ago
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