6 ms·

It was a sad day when I realized I was systematically overinvesting in skills on churning technology and that my investments would never amortize. Suddenly my p

It was a sad day when I realized I was systematically overinvesting in skills on churning technology and that my investments would never amortize. Suddenly my parents' stubborn unwillingness to bother learning anything technological made complete sense and I had to adjust my own patience threshold sharply downwards.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
There are some software tools where the investment pays back, and has been over decades. Microsoft Office (in part because it's not reinventing itself, but rather accrues new features; in part because everyone else copies its UI patterns). Photoshop. Emacs. With modern software, I find it that there isn't much to learn at all - in the past decade, seems to only be removing features and interaction modes, never adding anything new. Still, I don't regret having learned so much all those years ago. It gives me an idea what the software could do. What it was supposed to do. This means I often think of multi-step solutions for problems most people around me can't solve unless there's a dedicated SaaS for it. As frustrating as it often is to not be able to do something you could 10 years ago, sometimes I discover that some of the more advanced features still remain in modern toy-like software.
- eternalban 3y ago
  Office UI was reinvented at least one time. I remember when that god awful ribbon showed up. "In 2003, I was given the chance to lead the redesign of the most well-known suite of productivity software in the world: Microsoft Office. "Every day, over a billion people depended on apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, so it was a daunting task. This was the first redesign in the history of Office, and the work that we did ended up shaping the standard productivity experience for the next two decades." ... https://jensenharris.com/home/office https://jensenharris.com/home/office https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    That's not what I mean. The ribbon, whatever you think of it, only moved some functionality around. It didn't actually change the way old functionality worked. All the things you knew how to do, you could still do - you only had to learn their new placement.
  - heartbreak 3y ago
    If we consider the Word 2.0 (for Windows) era as the beginning of a graphical Microsoft Office suite, then graphical Office has had the ribbon for as long as it didn’t: 16 years. I’m still waiting for people to stop complaining about it.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      That move was awful
      - oblio 3y ago
        For you.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    The irony is that LLMs are actually the real solution that Ribbon took an awkward half step towards -- how to quickly get to what a user actually wants to do. Originally: Taxonomically organized nested menus, culminating at a specific function or option screen Now: Usage-optimized Ribbon (aka Huffman coding for the set off all options), culminating at a specific function or option screen Future: LLM powered semantic search across all options and actions, generating the exact change you want to implement Why have an "email signature" options page at all, when an LLM can stitch together the calls required to change it, invoked directly from English text?
    - mook 3y ago
      You missed Office 2000: magically disappearing menu items. It was pretty confusing.
CapsAdmin 3y ago
Maybe my time will come some day (I'm 32 years old), but I always tell myself that learning how to learn and being interested in new/different technology is how I keep myself updated. The latter is probably difficult to maintain, but this whole AI thing has given me a new pastime hobby I could never imagine. Maybe I'll reject instead of embrace the next big thing once I'm old enough?
SanderNL 3y ago
I find focusing on fundamental tools and concepts like terminals and text mode editors like vi and emacs will pay off handsomely. All the fancy dialogs will switch around every few years. This mindset extends to stuff like Word. Whenever you do something think hard about the essence of what you’re doing. Realize this should have been a script, but due to constraints in reality you are forced to use some wanky GUI. If you look at it like this, you won’t care the pixels move around. Your mental model will be solid and building that is 90% of the work.
kragen 3y ago
i'm using a web browser broadly similar to mosaic (01994) on a site that works similarly to early reddit (02005). in another window i'm running irssi (01999) to chat on irc (01988, but i've only been using it since 01994) inside screen (01987, but i've only been using it since 01994), to which i'm connected with ssh (01996) and mosh (02011, but i didn't start using it until last month). in my unix shell window (mate-terminal, but a thin wrapper around libvte (02002), mostly emulating a vt100 from 01978) i'm running a bourne shell (01979, but really it's brian fox's better reimplementation which he started in 01989) in which i just ran yt-dlp (which has to be updated every couple of months to keep working, but mostly has the same command-line flags as youtube-dl, first released in 02006) to download a video encoded in h.264 (02003) in an mpeg-4 container (01998), and then play it with mpv (02013, but forked from and sharing command-line flags with mplayer (02000)). mpv displays the video with a gpu renderer (new) on a display server running x11 (01987). in another browser tab i'm running jupyter (the renamed ipython notebook from 02011) to graph some dsp calculations with matplotlib (02003, but mostly providing the plotting functions from matlab (01984)) which i made with python (01991, but i've only been using it since 02000) and numpy (02006, but a mostly compatible reimplementation of numeric from 01995, which i've been using since 02003). in jupyter i can format my equations in latex (01984, but for equations basically the same as plain tex82 from 01982, but i've only been using them since 01999) and my text in markdown (02004, though jupyter's implementation supports many extensions). i keep the jupyter notebook in git (02005, but i've only been using it since 02009, when i switched from cvs (01986, but i've only been using it since about 01998)). the dsp stuff is largely applications of the convolution theorem (01822 or 01912) and hogenauer filters (01981). i do most of my programming that isn't in jupyter in gnu emacs (01984, but i didn't start using it until 01994) except that i prefer to do java stuff in intellij idea, which i first used in 02006 earlier this year, my wife and i wrote our wedding invitation rsvp site in html (01990, but using a lot of stuff added up to 02000) and css2 (01998) plus a few things like corner-radius (dunno, 02006?) and a little bit of js (01995, but in practical terms 02004), with the backend done in django (02005) backed by sqlite (02000, but this was sqlite3 (02004), but sqlite mostly just implements sql (01974, first publicly available in 01979, but mostly the 01992 ansi standard) which in turn mostly just implements codd's relational data model (01970) and acid transactions (01983), all of which i've been using since 01996). and of course python, emacs, and git. most of the css debugging was done with chromium's web inspector (present from the first chrome release in 02008, a clone of firebug (02006)). for looking up these dates just now, i used google's newish structured search results, which mostly pull information from wikipedia (02001); i also used stack overflow (02008) and its related sites. the median of the years above is 01998, with 25% and 75% quartiles of 01987 and 02004, which i calculated using r (01997, but a reimplementation of s (01976)). if we assume that each new introduction listed above displaced some existing skill, then we can vaguely handwave at a half-life of about 25 years for these churning technology skills, which to me seems like enough time for a lot of them to amortize; but it seems like it's slowing down a lot, because the 25% quartile is in 01987 and not 01973 it's true that all the time i spent configuring twm, olvwm, fvwm, and afterstep, and working around bugs in netscape 4's javascript implementation, and maintaining csh scripts and informix ace database applications, and logging into anonymous ftp sites running tops-20, and debugging irq conflicts, isn't really serving me today. but you could kind of tell that those things weren't the future. the surprising thing is really how slowly things change: that we're still running variants of the bourne shell in emulators of the vt100 other still-relevant technological skills for me today include building a fire, qwerty typing, ansi c (my wife is taking a class), bittorrent, operating a gas stove, and making instant coffee. still beyond me, though, is how to turn this tv on

TeMPOraL 3y ago

There are some software tools where the investment pays back, and has been over decades. Microsoft Office (in part because it's not reinventing itself, but rather accrues new features; in part because everyone else copies its UI patterns). Photoshop. Emacs. With modern software, I find it that there isn't much to learn at all - in the past decade, seems to only be removing features and interaction modes, never adding anything new. Still, I don't regret having learned so much all those years ago. It gives me an idea what the software could do. What it was supposed to do. This means I often think of multi-step solutions for problems most people around me can't solve unless there's a dedicated SaaS for it. As frustrating as it often is to not be able to do something you could 10 years ago, sometimes I discover that some of the more advanced features still remain in modern toy-like software.

eternalban 3y ago
Office UI was reinvented at least one time. I remember when that god awful ribbon showed up. "In 2003, I was given the chance to lead the redesign of the most well-known suite of productivity software in the world: Microsoft Office. "Every day, over a billion people depended on apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, so it was a daunting task. This was the first redesign in the history of Office, and the work that we did ended up shaping the standard productivity experience for the next two decades." ... https://jensenharris.com/home/office https://jensenharris.com/home/office https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon https://jensenharris.com/home/ribbon
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  That's not what I mean. The ribbon, whatever you think of it, only moved some functionality around. It didn't actually change the way old functionality worked. All the things you knew how to do, you could still do - you only had to learn their new placement.
- heartbreak 3y ago
  If we consider the Word 2.0 (for Windows) era as the beginning of a graphical Microsoft Office suite, then graphical Office has had the ribbon for as long as it didn’t: 16 years. I’m still waiting for people to stop complaining about it.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    That move was awful
    - oblio 3y ago
      For you.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  The irony is that LLMs are actually the real solution that Ribbon took an awkward half step towards -- how to quickly get to what a user actually wants to do. Originally: Taxonomically organized nested menus, culminating at a specific function or option screen Now: Usage-optimized Ribbon (aka Huffman coding for the set off all options), culminating at a specific function or option screen Future: LLM powered semantic search across all options and actions, generating the exact change you want to implement Why have an "email signature" options page at all, when an LLM can stitch together the calls required to change it, invoked directly from English text?
  - mook 3y ago
    You missed Office 2000: magically disappearing menu items. It was pretty confusing.

CapsAdmin 3y ago

Maybe my time will come some day (I'm 32 years old), but I always tell myself that learning how to learn and being interested in new/different technology is how I keep myself updated. The latter is probably difficult to maintain, but this whole AI thing has given me a new pastime hobby I could never imagine. Maybe I'll reject instead of embrace the next big thing once I'm old enough?

SanderNL 3y ago

I find focusing on fundamental tools and concepts like terminals and text mode editors like vi and emacs will pay off handsomely. All the fancy dialogs will switch around every few years. This mindset extends to stuff like Word. Whenever you do something think hard about the essence of what you’re doing. Realize this should have been a script, but due to constraints in reality you are forced to use some wanky GUI. If you look at it like this, you won’t care the pixels move around. Your mental model will be solid and building that is 90% of the work.

kragen 3y ago

i'm using a web browser broadly similar to mosaic (01994) on a site that works similarly to early reddit (02005). in another window i'm running irssi (01999) to chat on irc (01988, but i've only been using it since 01994) inside screen (01987, but i've only been using it since 01994), to which i'm connected with ssh (01996) and mosh (02011, but i didn't start using it until last month). in my unix shell window (mate-terminal, but a thin wrapper around libvte (02002), mostly emulating a vt100 from 01978) i'm running a bourne shell (01979, but really it's brian fox's better reimplementation which he started in 01989) in which i just ran yt-dlp (which has to be updated every couple of months to keep working, but mostly has the same command-line flags as youtube-dl, first released in 02006) to download a video encoded in h.264 (02003) in an mpeg-4 container (01998), and then play it with mpv (02013, but forked from and sharing command-line flags with mplayer (02000)). mpv displays the video with a gpu renderer (new) on a display server running x11 (01987). in another browser tab i'm running jupyter (the renamed ipython notebook from 02011) to graph some dsp calculations with matplotlib (02003, but mostly providing the plotting functions from matlab (01984)) which i made with python (01991, but i've only been using it since 02000) and numpy (02006, but a mostly compatible reimplementation of numeric from 01995, which i've been using since 02003). in jupyter i can format my equations in latex (01984, but for equations basically the same as plain tex82 from 01982, but i've only been using them since 01999) and my text in markdown (02004, though jupyter's implementation supports many extensions). i keep the jupyter notebook in git (02005, but i've only been using it since 02009, when i switched from cvs (01986, but i've only been using it since about 01998)). the dsp stuff is largely applications of the convolution theorem (01822 or 01912) and hogenauer filters (01981). i do most of my programming that isn't in jupyter in gnu emacs (01984, but i didn't start using it until 01994) except that i prefer to do java stuff in intellij idea, which i first used in 02006 earlier this year, my wife and i wrote our wedding invitation rsvp site in html (01990, but using a lot of stuff added up to 02000) and css2 (01998) plus a few things like corner-radius (dunno, 02006?) and a little bit of js (01995, but in practical terms 02004), with the backend done in django (02005) backed by sqlite (02000, but this was sqlite3 (02004), but sqlite mostly just implements sql (01974, first publicly available in 01979, but mostly the 01992 ansi standard) which in turn mostly just implements codd's relational data model (01970) and acid transactions (01983), all of which i've been using since 01996). and of course python, emacs, and git. most of the css debugging was done with chromium's web inspector (present from the first chrome release in 02008, a clone of firebug (02006)). for looking up these dates just now, i used google's newish structured search results, which mostly pull information from wikipedia (02001); i also used stack overflow (02008) and its related sites. the median of the years above is 01998, with 25% and 75% quartiles of 01987 and 02004, which i calculated using r (01997, but a reimplementation of s (01976)). if we assume that each new introduction listed above displaced some existing skill, then we can vaguely handwave at a half-life of about 25 years for these churning technology skills, which to me seems like enough time for a lot of them to amortize; but it seems like it's slowing down a lot, because the 25% quartile is in 01987 and not 01973 it's true that all the time i spent configuring twm, olvwm, fvwm, and afterstep, and working around bugs in netscape 4's javascript implementation, and maintaining csh scripts and informix ace database applications, and logging into anonymous ftp sites running tops-20, and debugging irq conflicts, isn't really serving me today. but you could kind of tell that those things weren't the future. the surprising thing is really how slowly things change: that we're still running variants of the bourne shell in emulators of the vt100 other still-relevant technological skills for me today include building a fire, qwerty typing, ansi c (my wife is taking a class), bittorrent, operating a gas stove, and making instant coffee. still beyond me, though, is how to turn this tv on