5 ms·

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when

I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams. I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

somewhatgoated 5mo ago
It’s pretty damn accurate in my case.
zoogeny 5mo ago
This feels apt in more than just science/technology. It matches my experience with culture as well, e.g. music and movies.
- the__alchemist 5mo ago
  I feel like many younger people still listen to music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s etc, as an exception (?)
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - degamad 5mo ago
    That's in the rule - for them it's "just a natural part of the way the world works".
    - the__alchemist 5mo ago
      Ah I misunderstood; my mistake!
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  It's way more apt with culture than with science or technology. The lack of patience from adults for learning the byzantine interfaces companies were making in the last quarter of the 20th century got generalized to a ridiculous degree.
- dylan604 5mo ago
  I knew I was officially old when I had to start trying to decipher what a teen was saying to me. All of the words were spoken in the language I speak, all of the words were heard by me, but their use of those words were not a use I was familiar.
  - vjk800 5mo ago
    It's even worse when you live in a small country with high amount of immigration. Half of the new words are borrowed from other languages or internet memes and there's no way to decipher their meaning without looking it up.
slillibri 5mo ago
I don't know about number 3. As a 53 year old Gen X'er, I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. The main things I don't understand are things like the Humane AI pin, which didn't seem against the natural order, I just didn't see the appeal or usefulness of it. Maybe it just doesn't seem like there is much new being invented.
- munificent 5mo ago
  > I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it. Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den. But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
  - delecti 5mo ago
    I don't want to defend short-form video feeds too much, but "They aren't even picking which videos to watch" is overstating it. Essentially nobody behaves like: watch 100% of a video, swipe, watch 100%, swipe. The expected behavior is that you swipe away if you're not interested, which is often done within a fraction of a second. Accordingly, Tiktok's content selection algorithm heavily weighs watch time as a signal of interest in related content. That actually can create a bit of a perverse incentive; if you linger on a video long enough to report it (as in for a TOS violation) or to click the "show less like this", it can lead to being shown more videos like that. In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. Watch a few seconds, next channel, watch a few seconds, next channel, oh this is interesting, sure I'll watch a "How It's Made" marathon.
    - dylan604 5mo ago
      > In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. I've been making the same comparison as well. As someone not watching the videos yet still hear the videos being played, the constant switching is very noticeable much like being the one in the room that didn't have the clicker in their hand. You're not in control of the constant switching which I think makes it even that much more annoying. Rather than just parking on the marathon, choosing to turn it off and do something else entirely is still my preferred "old man yells at clouds" option.
dylan604 5mo ago
As for 3, I think by the time you're in that age bracket, you've seen enough to not be fooled as much by the marketing so that a sale from a brochure alone is much less likely. Take the crypto fad as an example. To me, it was obvious that the "good" use would be limited and by far exceeded by the "bad" use. Current AI hype train is leading me in the same direction as nothing has quite lived up to what's printed on the tin. It just has that same icky pump&dump feel. At least AI has a some products that have a wider range of use than crypto
aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
I disagree with > 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. > 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. > 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. My experience is rather that early in your life you get "imprinted" with specific values, and then you judge technology by how it fits these values: For example, I was "imprinted" against surveillance since I was born in West Germany, and people were telling me what evil surveillance stuff the Stasi does in "the other Germany (GDR)". Also I deeply detested authorities (I was likely born this way), and thus got attracted to hacking. Thus, for example: I already heard about the internet early in my life (from magazines) - say, when I was 8 years old - but I actually saw how people organized stuff "offline" against what I would consider "how the world naturally works" (believe it or not). Smartphones were invented when I was between 15 and 35, but I immediately saw them as surveillance bugs. The same holds for the advent of social networks. On the other hand, 3D printing got mainstreamed later than when I was 35, but I immediately got in love with it, and couldn't wait the day until 3D printing got more reliable and I earned enough money to get a 3D printer, since 3D printers fit my values very well. So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.
- iammjm 5mo ago
  You might find the hypothesis more convincing if you replace technology (something you clearly care about and are up to date with) with something that's not generally your thing but which changes dynamically, like maybe music, fashion, or architecture
  - aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
    > You might find the hypothesis more convincing if you replace technology [...] with something that's not generally your thing but which changes dynamically, like maybe music, fashion, or architecture Let's take music. I clearly grew up in an environment where I think I got a rather "acquired", high-brow taste in music. While I, as of today, do see that some of this taste that I was imprinted with can be a little bit arbitrary, I would clearly say that nevertheless my taste in music is strongly influenced by whether it fits the "taste values" with which I was shaped early in my life, similarly to what I wrote in my previous post: > So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.
vjk800 5mo ago
I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children. I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat". The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children and having fun. When the world changes, stuff I need to worry about it: is this going to affect my job in the future? What is the long term effect of exposing my children to this? Is the stuff I teach my children going to be relevant in the future after this disruption has happened? I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up.
- plastic-enjoyer 5mo ago
  > I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up. I think the issue is that learning the stuff you are supposed to learn is simply not fun and a drain on your time and mental energy. If you're young you may compensate this because you have a lot of time and fewer responsibilities.
- DoctorOetker 5mo ago
  I believe it is possible to "upload" the knowledge from future reformulations of LLM's. Right now most of the weights are in the FFN neural nets, but I believe we can reformulate LLM's or distill them into a format where each token/character represents either a matrix or a geometric algebra multivector. If each weight becomes token/character associated, it means we could write mindless reaction speed games: have a 2D projection of token/word/concept multivector/matrix coordinates. Let the 2D projection smoothly evolve a grand tour through the space of projections, possibly only including new dimensions if user performance on the explored dimensions suffices. 95% of the tokens/words could be rendered at their correct positions, while say 5% is at their incorrect positions. So the user sees a subset of the character/word/tokens rendered, and since they are individually placed at a correct position 95% of the time, it allows a user to learn peripherally, the user just needs to click those tokens intentionally disturbed from their true positions. Consider the hypothetical scenario that eventually all coordinates are explored and hypothetically the user scores highly (perhaps 100% or 90%) then we could say that at least the high dimensional coordinates are properly uploaded. Now you could randomly render bigrams (the new matrix coordinates being the matrix product / the new multivector coordinates being the geometric product). Next we could hypothesize that with sufficient training the user can predict the correct position of bigrams (meaning the user brain is performing the same or similar computation). From this the likelihood could be computed, and so a user would start predicting the same next tokens the model would. It wouldn't be blind belief more like a user associating the claims with what the reaction speed game insinuates. Imagine having trained on random cyrillic characters and suddenly you understand the Greek ingredients on some food packaging. There is a lot of hypothesis here, but none of the steps seem impossible to me. It would mean both kids and adults could sync up with what LLM's claim (without blindly believing in it, but when it helps predict a lot of things around you people may lean and trust more on it, so that danger is not entirely moot), and having an LLM acquaintance in your brain to consult.
imtringued 5mo ago
I'm not sure this is true? 3. is more like this: You've been through 2. so many times now that it is hard to get excited about new things anymore. Enough time has passed that some of the things you've been excited for have failed or had negative consequences. You'll stick to the things that worked in 2. and are skeptical of things that have yet to prove themselves. In your 3., things from 2. are accepted unconditionally despite failures, making 3. inherently irrational.
kubb 5mo ago
Folks! This is a quip from a novelist! Take it with a grain of salt. It has to be punchy, not accurate.
- iwontberude 5mo ago
  Make comedy legal
- mettamage 5mo ago
  This comment helped to kick my "but but but!" instinct to the curb, haha. Thanks :)
- cafebabbe 5mo ago
  Ah, humor, this alien concept.
- PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
  For some reason I think most people on here are familiar with Douglas Adams.
- earleybird 5mo ago
  It's possible that Adams was expanding on an Alan Kay quote "Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born"
kelseydh 5mo ago
Feel the third so much with LLM's. But I get the sense younger generations aren't a fan of where it's moving the world either.
echelon_musk 5mo ago
Or to be clichéd and quote 2Pac: > You don't see no loud mouth thirty-year old motherfuckers
- teddyh 5mo ago
  “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.“ — Lieutenant Charles L. Wright
- glitchc 5mo ago
  Counter-point: George Carlin lived to a ripe old age of 71.
moralestapia 5mo ago
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy always make me burst into uncontrollable laughter. How was that guy SO creative and talented on that? Truly a treasure. Anyone can recommend books/movies with a similar style?

somewhatgoated 5mo ago

It’s pretty damn accurate in my case.

zoogeny 5mo ago

This feels apt in more than just science/technology. It matches my experience with culture as well, e.g. music and movies.

the__alchemist 5mo ago
I feel like many younger people still listen to music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s etc, as an exception (?)
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- degamad 5mo ago
  That's in the rule - for them it's "just a natural part of the way the world works".
  - the__alchemist 5mo ago
    Ah I misunderstood; my mistake!
marcosdumay 5mo ago
It's way more apt with culture than with science or technology. The lack of patience from adults for learning the byzantine interfaces companies were making in the last quarter of the 20th century got generalized to a ridiculous degree.
dylan604 5mo ago
I knew I was officially old when I had to start trying to decipher what a teen was saying to me. All of the words were spoken in the language I speak, all of the words were heard by me, but their use of those words were not a use I was familiar.
- vjk800 5mo ago
  It's even worse when you live in a small country with high amount of immigration. Half of the new words are borrowed from other languages or internet memes and there's no way to decipher their meaning without looking it up.

slillibri 5mo ago

I don't know about number 3. As a 53 year old Gen X'er, I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. The main things I don't understand are things like the Humane AI pin, which didn't seem against the natural order, I just didn't see the appeal or usefulness of it. Maybe it just doesn't seem like there is much new being invented.

munificent 5mo ago
> I still haven't come across things that see against the natural order. So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it. Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den. But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
- delecti 5mo ago
  I don't want to defend short-form video feeds too much, but "They aren't even picking which videos to watch" is overstating it. Essentially nobody behaves like: watch 100% of a video, swipe, watch 100%, swipe. The expected behavior is that you swipe away if you're not interested, which is often done within a fraction of a second. Accordingly, Tiktok's content selection algorithm heavily weighs watch time as a signal of interest in related content. That actually can create a bit of a perverse incentive; if you linger on a video long enough to report it (as in for a TOS violation) or to click the "show less like this", it can lead to being shown more videos like that. In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. Watch a few seconds, next channel, watch a few seconds, next channel, oh this is interesting, sure I'll watch a "How It's Made" marathon.
  - dylan604 5mo ago
    > In many ways, TikTok is kinda like channel surfing. I've been making the same comparison as well. As someone not watching the videos yet still hear the videos being played, the constant switching is very noticeable much like being the one in the room that didn't have the clicker in their hand. You're not in control of the constant switching which I think makes it even that much more annoying. Rather than just parking on the marathon, choosing to turn it off and do something else entirely is still my preferred "old man yells at clouds" option.

dylan604 5mo ago

As for 3, I think by the time you're in that age bracket, you've seen enough to not be fooled as much by the marketing so that a sale from a brochure alone is much less likely. Take the crypto fad as an example. To me, it was obvious that the "good" use would be limited and by far exceeded by the "bad" use. Current AI hype train is leading me in the same direction as nothing has quite lived up to what's printed on the tin. It just has that same icky pump&dump feel. At least AI has a some products that have a wider range of use than crypto

aleph_minus_one 5mo ago

I disagree with > 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. > 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. > 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things. My experience is rather that early in your life you get "imprinted" with specific values, and then you judge technology by how it fits these values: For example, I was "imprinted" against surveillance since I was born in West Germany, and people were telling me what evil surveillance stuff the Stasi does in "the other Germany (GDR)". Also I deeply detested authorities (I was likely born this way), and thus got attracted to hacking. Thus, for example: I already heard about the internet early in my life (from magazines) - say, when I was 8 years old - but I actually saw how people organized stuff "offline" against what I would consider "how the world naturally works" (believe it or not). Smartphones were invented when I was between 15 and 35, but I immediately saw them as surveillance bugs. The same holds for the advent of social networks. On the other hand, 3D printing got mainstreamed later than when I was 35, but I immediately got in love with it, and couldn't wait the day until 3D printing got more reliable and I earned enough money to get a 3D printer, since 3D printers fit my values very well. So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.

iammjm 5mo ago
You might find the hypothesis more convincing if you replace technology (something you clearly care about and are up to date with) with something that's not generally your thing but which changes dynamically, like maybe music, fashion, or architecture
- aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
  > You might find the hypothesis more convincing if you replace technology [...] with something that's not generally your thing but which changes dynamically, like maybe music, fashion, or architecture Let's take music. I clearly grew up in an environment where I think I got a rather "acquired", high-brow taste in music. While I, as of today, do see that some of this taste that I was imprinted with can be a little bit arbitrary, I would clearly say that nevertheless my taste in music is strongly influenced by whether it fits the "taste values" with which I was shaped early in my life, similarly to what I wrote in my previous post: > So, in my experience it is typically not about the year when something was invented, but rather about whether the invention is a good or bad fit for the values that you were shaped with in your early life.

vjk800 5mo ago

I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children. I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat". The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children and having fun. When the world changes, stuff I need to worry about it: is this going to affect my job in the future? What is the long term effect of exposing my children to this? Is the stuff I teach my children going to be relevant in the future after this disruption has happened? I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up.

plastic-enjoyer 5mo ago
> I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up. I think the issue is that learning the stuff you are supposed to learn is simply not fun and a drain on your time and mental energy. If you're young you may compensate this because you have a lot of time and fewer responsibilities.
DoctorOetker 5mo ago
I believe it is possible to "upload" the knowledge from future reformulations of LLM's. Right now most of the weights are in the FFN neural nets, but I believe we can reformulate LLM's or distill them into a format where each token/character represents either a matrix or a geometric algebra multivector. If each weight becomes token/character associated, it means we could write mindless reaction speed games: have a 2D projection of token/word/concept multivector/matrix coordinates. Let the 2D projection smoothly evolve a grand tour through the space of projections, possibly only including new dimensions if user performance on the explored dimensions suffices. 95% of the tokens/words could be rendered at their correct positions, while say 5% is at their incorrect positions. So the user sees a subset of the character/word/tokens rendered, and since they are individually placed at a correct position 95% of the time, it allows a user to learn peripherally, the user just needs to click those tokens intentionally disturbed from their true positions. Consider the hypothetical scenario that eventually all coordinates are explored and hypothetically the user scores highly (perhaps 100% or 90%) then we could say that at least the high dimensional coordinates are properly uploaded. Now you could randomly render bigrams (the new matrix coordinates being the matrix product / the new multivector coordinates being the geometric product). Next we could hypothesize that with sufficient training the user can predict the correct position of bigrams (meaning the user brain is performing the same or similar computation). From this the likelihood could be computed, and so a user would start predicting the same next tokens the model would. It wouldn't be blind belief more like a user associating the claims with what the reaction speed game insinuates. Imagine having trained on random cyrillic characters and suddenly you understand the Greek ingredients on some food packaging. There is a lot of hypothesis here, but none of the steps seem impossible to me. It would mean both kids and adults could sync up with what LLM's claim (without blindly believing in it, but when it helps predict a lot of things around you people may lean and trust more on it, so that danger is not entirely moot), and having an LLM acquaintance in your brain to consult.

imtringued 5mo ago

I'm not sure this is true? 3. is more like this: You've been through 2. so many times now that it is hard to get excited about new things anymore. Enough time has passed that some of the things you've been excited for have failed or had negative consequences. You'll stick to the things that worked in 2. and are skeptical of things that have yet to prove themselves. In your 3., things from 2. are accepted unconditionally despite failures, making 3. inherently irrational.

kubb 5mo ago

Folks! This is a quip from a novelist! Take it with a grain of salt. It has to be punchy, not accurate.

iwontberude 5mo ago
Make comedy legal
mettamage 5mo ago
This comment helped to kick my "but but but!" instinct to the curb, haha. Thanks :)
cafebabbe 5mo ago
Ah, humor, this alien concept.
PokemonNoGo 5mo ago
For some reason I think most people on here are familiar with Douglas Adams.
earleybird 5mo ago
It's possible that Adams was expanding on an Alan Kay quote "Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born"

kelseydh 5mo ago

Feel the third so much with LLM's. But I get the sense younger generations aren't a fan of where it's moving the world either.

echelon_musk 5mo ago

Or to be clichéd and quote 2Pac: > You don't see no loud mouth thirty-year old motherfuckers

teddyh 5mo ago
“There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.“ — Lieutenant Charles L. Wright
glitchc 5mo ago
Counter-point: George Carlin lived to a ripe old age of 71.

moralestapia 5mo ago

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy always make me burst into uncontrollable laughter. How was that guy SO creative and talented on that? Truly a treasure. Anyone can recommend books/movies with a similar style?