> Information has not become more seamless.
> There has never even been a reduction in the number of seams.
> It just has not ever happened.
This is ridiculous. The world of information today with the Internet is better than it was in the 1970s. It just is, that is an indisputable fact. We have more information at our fingertips than we have ever had in human history, and it's good that we have that information. Finding information has become more seamless.
I can go on Reddit right now and get a dozen people to give me detailed breakdowns of what fountain pen to purchase. Last week I got a professional chalk artist to give me recommendations on what chalk brands I should be looking at within 30 minutes of me posting the question. When my parent's computer broke a couple months ago, my Dad went on Youtube and got detailed instructions on how to take it apart and fix it from someone who didn't even speak English. It's not just that people exist who can help you out, there are enough of them online, even if they're nontechnical, that even the most niche topics can often support a community of educators and experts.
And that's not even talking about the social effects of being a marginalized individual and having access to other people who are like you, even if you live in a rural repressed area. Growing up alone without the Internet if you're in a hostile environment is awful. Nobody should wish that on anyone.
I get that it's trendy right now to hate on the Internet, but the author really needs to get some perspective on this.
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And on the subject of software being 'done', pick any creative field, anywhere, and ask people working in it if there are any new things they want their computer to do. I can think of 5-10 features purely off of the top of my head that I want added to Krita that would make me a much more productive artist. Does anyone really believe that if you went to a 3D artist and had them look at the state of Blender today that they would say, "all of that is just cruft, it isn't making my life easier."
It's absurd. People romanticize the past, but even just going back 15 years, Linux wasn't an ideal paradise. It was hard to do everything. Nobody who wasn't a computer engineer could reliably use the OS. Today, I have children who haven't even gotten out elementary school using Linux as a daily driver, because the OS got better and because software today, for all of its real flaws, is still way better than it used to be.
If people want to point at flaws in modern software, I'm down for it, there are plenty. If people want to say that we've regressed in some areas like Unix philosophy, I'm down for that too. I think we have regressed in some ways. But it's just not a coherent argument to say that software has gotten less accessible or that it hasn't made any gains in the past 20 years. Try to retouch a photo in a 20 year-old version of Gimp, and then try to tell me how amazing everything was back then.
This is ridiculous. The world of information today with the Internet is better than it was in the 1970s. It just is, that is an indisputable fact. We have more information at our fingertips than we have ever had in human history, and it's good that we have that information. Finding information has become more seamless.
I can go on Reddit right now and get a dozen people to give me detailed breakdowns of what fountain pen to purchase. Last week I got a professional chalk artist to give me recommendations on what chalk brands I should be looking at within 30 minutes of me posting the question. When my parent's computer broke a couple months ago, my Dad went on Youtube and got detailed instructions on how to take it apart and fix it from someone who didn't even speak English. It's not just that people exist who can help you out, there are enough of them online, even if they're nontechnical, that even the most niche topics can often support a community of educators and experts.
And that's not even talking about the social effects of being a marginalized individual and having access to other people who are like you, even if you live in a rural repressed area. Growing up alone without the Internet if you're in a hostile environment is awful. Nobody should wish that on anyone.
I get that it's trendy right now to hate on the Internet, but the author really needs to get some perspective on this.
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And on the subject of software being 'done', pick any creative field, anywhere, and ask people working in it if there are any new things they want their computer to do. I can think of 5-10 features purely off of the top of my head that I want added to Krita that would make me a much more productive artist. Does anyone really believe that if you went to a 3D artist and had them look at the state of Blender today that they would say, "all of that is just cruft, it isn't making my life easier."
It's absurd. People romanticize the past, but even just going back 15 years, Linux wasn't an ideal paradise. It was hard to do everything. Nobody who wasn't a computer engineer could reliably use the OS. Today, I have children who haven't even gotten out elementary school using Linux as a daily driver, because the OS got better and because software today, for all of its real flaws, is still way better than it used to be.
If people want to point at flaws in modern software, I'm down for it, there are plenty. If people want to say that we've regressed in some areas like Unix philosophy, I'm down for that too. I think we have regressed in some ways. But it's just not a coherent argument to say that software has gotten less accessible or that it hasn't made any gains in the past 20 years. Try to retouch a photo in a 20 year-old version of Gimp, and then try to tell me how amazing everything was back then.