Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers.
It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
I also saw a lot of blockchain specialists joining the banks a few years back. Coincidence? Not quite. Defense is probably the largest consumer of technology and also driving force behind tech innovations (ARPANET?).
Selling has poisoned human life. As someone who grew on a farm, with a culture that never bothered to sell anything, and never cared to impress anyone, we pitied on the pathetic business/sales people and anyone who tries to impress other through art/acts etc. The street performer such as drama artists and acrobats got some kind give-aways.
Today, I can't watch any TV without immediately realizing that every face I see on TV is forced to sell their expression and talk. They are basically selling, not expressing their true feelings. Every great movie, actor, great singer, great anchor - everyone. There is nothing natural in human interactions any more.
One of my favorite proofs that the sums of each row are powers of two comes from the fact that the numbers in row n+1 are the coefficients of the powers of (a+b)ⁿ, so setting a=b=1 you get 2ⁿ (most discrete math students seeking to prove this end up reaching for induction which is a heavier proof than this).
I like the argument that every number in the row below is formed by summing two numbers from above. So each number above appears twice below. Hence the sum doubles.
What can be proven depends on what is allowed be a part of mathematics and logic. Zero, negative numbers, imaginary numbers and a lot other stuff had go through the acceptance first before they can be used in proofs. A lot of foundational concepts in logic, reality, causality, boolean exclusivity, spatial locality - had to be rewritten due to advances in quantum physics etc.
Logicians and philosophers of mathematics have also questioned ZF set theory and "set theory" more generally.
For example the axiom of infinity (by finitists), the power set axiom and first-order theories in general (the downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem implies that the infinity and power set axioms can't guarantee the existence on an uncountable power set), the fact that ZF doesn't allow a set of everything, and in particular no proper set complements, the fact that the axiom of regularity seems to be useless, etc.
Of course most ordinary mathematicians don't care about all that, because they don't care about ZF(C) or set theory or the foundation of mathematics in general. They rather care about problems in their specific field, like algebraic topology or whatnot.
I wasn't trying to make an appeal to authority due 100 years having passed, that was tangential to my point that almost all modern math now sits on formalized axioms, which it did not do before the foundational crisis in math was resolved (about 100 years ago).
Comparing the axioms of math to relativity in physics is just nonsensical.
Math is independent of observation, if a proof is formally correct now, it will always be correct under that chosen axiomatic system. Sure, we can play with different axioms (as others commented, it's common to drop the axiom of choice), but that doesn't invalidate the previous work at all.
Math is not independent of observation. Math sits on logic which itself sprouts from human experience with the world around them. Math and logic are not alien pure forms isolated from this world. There is not even single concept of logic that is not fully tied to the human experience and perception (of the world).
The concepts such as true, false, equal, greater than - all refer to human experience with counting things or perception of existence etc.
While there used to be resistance to coming up with new formal systems that played with loosening certain restrictions in long-used systems, I think this has not been true for a long time. If you want to come up with a new set of axioms of arithmetic today in which pi = 3, and you can actually come up with a set of meaningful axioms and prove some interesting property of this formal system, I don't think it would be that hard to get mathematicians to accept it and occasionally use it.
I might need an ELI5 here. "Right to repair" as in "right to choose someone who repairs"? Don't think anyone stops you from repairing your own stuff yourself.
It's almost never been a question of how to execute the repair - rather, it's a matter of repercussions for repairing 'yourself' (or authorizing a third party to on your behalf). Actors like John Deere and Apple have taken steps that are actively hostile to self-repairs, from voiding service agreements that have nothing to do with the repaired parts, up to bricking your device.
easiest example: most components of a macbook laptop have their serial number baked in the OS (or some hardware controller, idr). So even if you can find a legit macbook part from another laptop, and you can even replace it yourself (which is also impossible but that's another story), the laptop won't boot. In order for it to boot, you need a special device which "official apple repair" people have, which can bake-in the new part's serial number.
Security measure - otherwise someone can intercept your MacBook during delivery, replace the original component with a fake one that has a backdoor and ship it to you and you start using it completely oblivious to the fact it has been hacked.
That might be an argument to reject non-genuine components, but it's not an argument to reject genuine components just because they've previously been installed in a different device. (And even if it's possible to modify a genuine component to add backdoors, this still doesn't help, since they could just modify the one that came out of your MacBook too.)
In theory people will steal Apple devices, then when they learn that digital locks make them impossible to use they will gut them for parts and sell those. Serial locking would defeat that. In practice, yes, it pretty much just exists to make them millions off of forced overpriced in-house repairs.
It's purpose is to legally force other companies to serve the interests repair shops over consumers. Instead of letting the free market, consumers, dictate what aspects of a device are important repair shops want to be able to profit off of every device and stay relevant even if it results in worse products for the consumer.
We've "let the free market decide", and the consequence is that consumers got fucked.
In general, this tired adage about "market efficiency" has stopped making sense to most people a long time ago. Whatever unregulated markets are efficient at, it's not making the average person's life better. Don't be surprised then that said average person votes for regulation.
The entire point is that companies are vertically integrating the repairs market into their product business. This directly removes competition from the market. The regulation here is to preserve the free market you are advocating for here.
1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.
2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.
3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
1. They do have a choice. No one is forcing them to buy a specific product.
2. A product who is more complicated and expensive to repair is not necessarily a worse product. This could be a trade off in favor of something consumers value more.
3. It's normal to target a lifespan for a product. For mature products ignoring it is a sign of amateurs. This is not the same thing as making a product bad on purpose.
1. Choice isn't binary, there's infinite levels of choice. Other comment mentions information asymmetry, that's part of it. Not all choices are clear, some choices take unrealistic amount of time to make, some of them are incompatible with work or contracts, and on and on.
2. Sure, but this is not why it's being done. It can be a trade-off, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that a lot of products are specifically made worse because you can make more money that way. Anti-repair is a racketeering scheme first, any other "benefits" are secondary. That doesn't mean they aren't real benefits, but it does mean that they were never the intention.
3. Planned obsolesce is the same as making a product worse on purpose to make more money. That doesn't mean that targeting a lifespan is bad. But when you shift from making washing machines that last 20 years to ones that last 5, that's an intentional choice to get more money from consumers.
There's some significant information asymmetry involved such that it's a lot of effort to know how repairable a new product is. The consumer may not even be the one to perform the repair; there are a lot of independent repair shops replacing things like smartphone displays. It would be a nasty surprise for someone who got their screen replaced for $80 on their last phone to learn it's first-party-only and $300 on their new one a couple years into ownership.
The overwhelming majority of consumers are also employees.
What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.
Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.
By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.
Consumers can still by products they can repair themselves if they value such an aspect of a product. I'd it is an extra cost than that gives a competitive advantage to other products who aren't vertical integrated like that.
That's only true of there aren't market implications to this newly-introduced rent-seeking model.
If your position is that market competition is what will overcome the negative implications of anticompetitive behavior, your position is logically incoherent.
The reality is that the only way to be competitive on price (and thereby survive as a business) is to do your own rent-seeking. We can all plainly see that this is how it has played out in reality. No business can actually rely on the promise of right-to-repair obsessed consumers to keep them afloat.
Thats because there isn't one and there hasn't been for a long time, and I'm not talking about libertarian fever dreams. Regulatory capture and legislated protection for big corporations at the expense of smaller ones are rampant. They don't want real competition and they don't want real regulation, only regulation that will make it hard for others to enter the market without significant cost.
Well, all this sounds inspiring, motivational, puristic or platonic etc. But the reality hits. You are connected to the world around you. That means you need to make deals with it, interact with it, please it etc. The feedback (or the lack of it) from the world does affect you. If you don't care about the feedback, then there is no point in posting. Sing it in your shower. So you really expect some future fame. In more likelihood, it may not come. Does it affect you? I know, you have some belief that it will come. But is that belief rational and practical? Does it justify the investment you make right now?
Face it. Blogging, or for that matter any online creative content, is becoming extremely low-rewarding effort. First, no one pays for content any more. Next, they don't even have time to clap, or grasp the quality. And then, there is this AI slop.
About 30 years back, I spent days on an abstract art, perfecting it's shading using only an ink pen. It looked a bit geometric. When I showed it to my college hostel mates, they could not believe it was hand-made. Some of them claimed that they know the instruments which can be used to make it, and dismissed my entire effort.
Nothing wrong with the situation. At some point in history, humans did not need to spend their entire time in finding food, raising kids, taking care of family and community etc. So they got into services business, selling services to each other. One kid polishes a fine pebble and exchanges it with the other kid for a nicely carved wood piece. Their elders don't see value in any of these and shout at them to go and hunt for more food. But the services thrived, outpacing the real needs of the humans. Technologies and tools evolved claiming magical abilities. Sane humans only care about their basic needs. So they just use the magical tech for the basic needs, which makes perfect sense.
I have seen banks doing this for about 10 years now. Some are at an advanced stage. They tried multiple things - third-party consortium chains, own coins, tokens etc. Now they are starting to realize that the banks need not jump on the bandwagon of public crypto or pegging to some chain. Collectively they can build their own self-sustaining chains.
Just saying, that will not have any positive effect until 2050. We are far to far in the incoming crash. And that is not even talking about the strain that will hit the health care sector, no matter what we raise the retirement age too.
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