3 ms·

Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in everyday li

by diego 12y ago

Sam is probably too young to remember what the world was like before the internet. From my perspective (just turned 45), the technological change in everyday life between 1994 and 2004 is much more significant than the incremental improvements in the past 10 years. - In 1994 I didn't even have dialup internet; in 2004 I had a reliable 1 mbps connection. - In 1994 I knew few people with mobile phones; in 2004 I had one with a color screen (Motorola v600) that could search Google and take pictures. Facebook and Twitter did not exist, but the basic entertainment and communication functions they provide are not radically different from those of online forums, chatrooms, email, older social networks. The main difference that Sam overlooks is that in 2004 all this was not available to hundreds of millions (billions?) of people in the world, just like the internet was not (or barely) available to me in 1994.

patrickk 12y ago
A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e. incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc. Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years). Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting more unstable and risky as time progresses. EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies funded and off the ground https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
- spindritf 12y ago
  A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law If you believe Robin Hanson, maybe even all software innovation ever. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow-like-algorithms.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow...
thaumaturgy 12y ago
I have a knee-jerk inclination to agree, but when I think harder about it, I'm not sure if that's just a bias towards the technologies that I had the most free time to spend on -- when I was a kid. I want to say that Reddit is a poor imitation of IRC, and IRC wasn't really anything new because there were BBSs ... but I probably spent more time on BBSs and IRC than I've spent on Reddit. So, for me, those things have left a greater impression. For younger people who've never dialed up a BBS, Reddit seems amazing. In general, yeah, the early 90s seems like a whirlwind of technological change compared to today. But, I bet if I asked my dad, he'd say that the 70s and 80s were moreso, because he worked in television distribution systems and has never been really comfortable with a computer. And I bet if he asked his dad, it would be highways and transportation ... and so on. 2014 is the "social" age, and that's not something I've participated in very much. So I'm probably less likely to see Snapchat and whathaveyou as a really big deal.
jimbokun 12y ago
There certainly seem to be inflection points in computing innovation. The PC revolution starting with Homebrew, through Apple I and II to Macintosh, and the PC and Windows, was an unbelievable ride. But then there was a slower period of several years where innovation consisted mainly of Microsoft slowly assimilating the remaining interesting features of the Mac. Then the ascendance of the web and Netscape, through Dotcom bubble, Google, Amazon, Facebook (and millions of other sites). Then iPhone in 2007 launched the mobile software gold rush. With smart phone innovation starting to slow down (getting harder to dream up can't live without functionality missing from today's phones), it's not clear where the next inflection point will come from. Robotics? VR?

by diego 12y ago

patrickk 12y ago

A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law, cheaper storage and cheaper bandwidth, i.e. incremental, sometimes useful improvements via the web, but no nanotech robots that detect cancer, Mars base, nuclear fusion, etc. Innovation seems to have stalled in the world of atoms, cars (and transport generally), houses, healthcare etc all not noticeably improving, except incrementally (deliberately ignoring Tesla, which will hopefully have a widespread impact on the entire car industry in the coming years). Some areas have gotten worse overall, such as finance, which seems to be disconnected from creating value for the wider economy and seems to be getting more unstable and risky as time progresses. EDIT: I don't mean to sound overly negative, some of the YC RFSs sound quite ambitious, I hope they succeed in attracting more of those types of companies funded and off the ground https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

spindritf 12y ago
A lot of the so-called innovation of the past 10 years seems to purely piggyback on Moore's Law If you believe Robin Hanson, maybe even all software innovation ever. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow-like-algorithms.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/06/why-does-hardware-grow...

thaumaturgy 12y ago

I have a knee-jerk inclination to agree, but when I think harder about it, I'm not sure if that's just a bias towards the technologies that I had the most free time to spend on -- when I was a kid. I want to say that Reddit is a poor imitation of IRC, and IRC wasn't really anything new because there were BBSs ... but I probably spent more time on BBSs and IRC than I've spent on Reddit. So, for me, those things have left a greater impression. For younger people who've never dialed up a BBS, Reddit seems amazing. In general, yeah, the early 90s seems like a whirlwind of technological change compared to today. But, I bet if I asked my dad, he'd say that the 70s and 80s were moreso, because he worked in television distribution systems and has never been really comfortable with a computer. And I bet if he asked his dad, it would be highways and transportation ... and so on. 2014 is the "social" age, and that's not something I've participated in very much. So I'm probably less likely to see Snapchat and whathaveyou as a really big deal.

jimbokun 12y ago

There certainly seem to be inflection points in computing innovation. The PC revolution starting with Homebrew, through Apple I and II to Macintosh, and the PC and Windows, was an unbelievable ride. But then there was a slower period of several years where innovation consisted mainly of Microsoft slowly assimilating the remaining interesting features of the Mac. Then the ascendance of the web and Netscape, through Dotcom bubble, Google, Amazon, Facebook (and millions of other sites). Then iPhone in 2007 launched the mobile software gold rush. With smart phone innovation starting to slow down (getting harder to dream up can't live without functionality missing from today's phones), it's not clear where the next inflection point will come from. Robotics? VR?