
Letter to 20 Years Ago - zdw
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2020/09/06/20yearsago.html
======
jart
> Your idea that people should own their own computers because they’re
> critical tools isn't wrong, but it is elitist. For the vast majority of
> people, their desktops degrade into a fragile truce with a whole ecosystem
> of malware and near-malware.

I used to buy the homes of people who were delinquent on their taxes. To my
surprise I learned that people also develop a fragile truce with a whole
ecosystem of insects and animal droppings. Are most people like that? I choose
to believe no. Because I think what's elitist is choosing to believe most
people are too unhealthy to take care of themselves. Folks who think that way
are going to be biased towards building orwellian tech dystopias. Just because
unclean people exist, doesn't mean the rest of us don't deserve freedom.

Also there's just as much unscrupulous software in the mobile world as there
is in the desktop world. It's just that, rather than being called malware,
it's called an app with overly broad permissions. Like you download a Family
Guy game and it uploads all your emails and photos to some business
intelligence database. But that's apparently considered OK for some reason,
since the user consented to it having that capability, likely believing that
permission agreements would be as innocuous to consumers as EULAs.

~~~
underwater
I feel like I had a better time downloading Windows programs off of TUCOWS in
2000 than the App Store in 2020. I don't know exactly how the incentives have
aligned, but the modern app stores are dominated by ad-ridden, manipulative,
rubbish.

~~~
jart
2000 was the pinnacle of Windows' golden age. iPhone golden age was probably
2007 to 2010. I was there. Nothing better than star products in their growth
phase. Unfortunately MBAs are taught a self-fulfilling prophecy that what
invariably follows in a product's lifecycle is decline. So once it hits market
saturation, they immediately pivot their strategy towards squeezing the most
value out of a community as its members are willing to tolerate. As it turns
out, 3.8 billion smartphone users are willing to tolerate a lot.

~~~
quicklime
I was there too. In the year 2000 most Windows users weren't running an NT
version of Windows. The web browser that came with the OS enabled constant
popup ads, making it unusable. You were in theory supposed to "defragment"
your hard disk periodically - this was purely theoretical because everyone had
to reformat their hard drives wholesale before fragmentation became a problem,
so that they could get rid of all the accumulated malware. Some golden age.

------
unemphysbro
Listen to your non-technical mom trying to get you to mine bitcoin in 2010. :)

~~~
inopinatus
My letter reads:

* AAPL & AMZN, long hold

* Leicester City, 2015-16 English Premier League

* It _is_ your L3 nerve root. Get a second MRI

* Move to New Zealand in 2019

~~~
shadowprofile77
Really? No bitcoin? I mean, I know, lots of hate on HN about the whole thing
being scammy and rife with criminal activity, but none of that changes that
buying it in 2010 would right now give you insane and fairly liquid returns on
one of the absolute best performing speculative assets of modern history. And
since you're writing a letter to the past before 2010, well......

~~~
pjc50
I knew someone in the same office as me who bought in at about $400, ran an
arbitrage bot between exchanges .. and somehow lost money on it. The flaws
were clear.

If you bought _and held_ (which requires keeping the keys secret against a lot
of attacks and not losing them), and also managed to pick the peak to sell at,
and managed to sell without being scammed, exit-scammed by the exchange, or
having your account locked, then yes you could have made a lot of money.
Because there's a lot of risk along the way.

~~~
core-questions
> which requires keeping the keys secret against a lot of attacks and not
> losing them

Piece of paper in a safety deposit box (maybe even at 2-3 different banks)
would do this just fine, but you'd have to know it was going to be worthwhile
enough to have bothered.

> managed to pick the peak to sell at

Just sell bits of it here and there to spread the risk around.

------
aerovistae
it feels like this ended very abruptly? I was enjoying it and then it seemed
to end almost mid-sentence

~~~
esolyt
glad to know i'm not the only who felt that. i kept trying to scroll assuming
my browser is broken.

i think it's also the design of the page. it has no footer.

~~~
aerovistae
I did the same thing!!! Lmao

------
asveikau
Not to be "that guy", but this references Windows XP which was released 19
years ago.

I also think you don't need to keep referring to phones as PDA. You can just
say that cell phones merged with what we used to call PDAs, or became more
PDA-like. Somebody in a coma since 2000 would get that.

~~~
phone8675309
According to the Wikipedia article on Windows XP[0]

> At PDC on July 13, 2000, Microsoft announced that Whistler would be released
> during the second half of 2001, and also unveiled the first preview build,
> 2250. The build notably introduced an early version of Windows XP's visual
> styles system.

> Whistler was officially unveiled during a media event on February 5, 2001,
> under the name Windows XP, where XP stands for "eXPerience".

So while the product wasn't released until 2001, the codename and preview
builds for developers were already released.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP)

~~~
robotron
And the Dev builds were out in the wild.

------
ridiculous_fish
> The kernel has been fixed a little: you can now get a handle to a process,
> so no more PID races

What is this referencing? I don't know how to do that! edit: I think this is
referring to opening the /proc/pid directory - I don't think this technique is
well known yet.
[https://lwn.net/Articles/773459/](https://lwn.net/Articles/773459/)

~~~
lmns
Maybe it refers to cgroups and systemd?

------
dehrmann
Also, that ship that gets bombed in a month? Take it more seriously.

~~~
gonzo41
USS Cole right. It seems like the inertia to things was well under way.
Everything was already underway for the next years events anyway.

------
felipemnoa
>>I'm afraid Scott Adams won’t seem so wholesome in the future either

No kidding.

~~~
welcome_dragon
... what about him? I'm not familiar with any controversy?

~~~
phone8675309
Orange man bad.

------
fghorow
Heh.

Two words: Buy AAPL.

~~~
pippy
or one: Bitcoin.

you'd have to wait 8 years though

~~~
adventured
How many bytes can this letter be? I'd send myself Bitcoin's source and then
hold the equivalent of Satoshi's position, or greater, for myself.

~~~
LarvaFX
Probably that's what actually happened.

------
konjin
In 2020: Your idea that people should own their own computers because they’re
critical tools isn't wrong, but it is elitist.

In 1515: Your idea that people learn to read isn't wrong, but it's elitist.

The majority of peoples computer experience has been reduced to tapping
colorful pictures for dopamine hits that force them to watch more adds.

An interface quite literally better suited to monkeys than to people:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPiDHXtM0VA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPiDHXtM0VA)

That we have not taught people the fundamentals of computer interaction is a
failure of education. One that took centuries to solve for books and wasn't
perfected until the 18th century. And only when people had stopped killing
each other after finally reading the Bible and realizing that the information
gatekeepers were lying to them for their own benefit.

~~~
DerekL
By the way, the abbreviation of _advertisement_ is _ad_ , not _add_.

~~~
phist_mcgee
Ah yes. The most useful contribution to this discussion of all. The grammar
correction.

~~~
dang
I know that nitpicky comments can be annoying, but the problem with posting
like this is that it makes the thread even worse. It's also against the site
guidelines—would you mind reviewing them? They include: _Please don 't sneer._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
cryptica
If I had to write a letter to myself 20 years ago, it would be:

\- People are evil and getting more evil. Don't trust anyone. The governments
of the world are corrupt and will become more corrupt. Forget about principles
and ethics.

\- Invest in the hype. Those who control the money supply are twisted fucks.
Don't save money, don't look for value investments, don't look for logic or
reason. Do the opposite of everything you were taught. Be reckless. Follow the
trends. Don't think; just do what everyone else is doing as soon as it starts
to look trendy. Don't look at the underlying tech or fundamentals; the worse
the fundamentals, the less efficient, the better the investment!

\- Corporations are going to get bigger because the government will help them
to establish and expand their monopolies and this will make it impossible to
start a small business since it will compete with the interests of
corporations. The playing field is not even so don't play that fucking game;
they get free money from the government, you don't; they play a different
game. The majority of people with power will support corporate monopolies no
matter how harmful they are, so nobody will even speak up, you'll be fucked.

\- Don't start working on open source. Even if your open source project
becomes popular, corporations will use your open source work to make the world
a worse place and everyone will make money from your work except you. What
kind of fucking world do you think this is?

\- Playing by the rules and doing the right thing is for idiots! So far you've
been a fucking idiot!

\- Be an asshole! Everyone else around you will be an even worse piece of shit
so you won't even feel bad about it! It will feel normal. Your successful
asshole friends will even think you're a nice guy and they will praise you for
your comparatively superior ethics (trust me, the worst stuff that you're
capable of doing is not that bad).

\- If you think that this sounds 'not worth it', you don't want to know what
happens if you continue down the righteous path that you're currently on.
Trust me, as your future self who always tried to do the right thing, choose
the asshole path.

~~~
shp0ngle
congratulations you just bought Enron

