> Is it more human to live in a village where the local feudal lord has right of life and death on everyone?
Certainly, marginalized communities probably feel this was about their local police force. How do you think people feel about the police during the Uvalde shootings?
> Where people are bought and sold as cattle with the land they are forced to live on?
People live in expensive cities because that is where the jobs are and where they live are controlled by landlords who were eager to evict them during the pandemic until some cities enacted eviction bans for a time. Private equity are buying entire neighborhoods to rent them out. Sure, in theory no one is forced to live anywhere, but in practice they are.
> Is it more human to live in a kingdom that will go to war…
You mean the War on Terror? The proxy wars against communism (e.g. Vietnam)? The World Wars? The numerous conflicts the US fought to overthrow democratic elected leaders in South America and the world to install dictators more aligned with US business interests (for their oil, their resources, to “liberalize” their economy so US multinationals can take over the local economy)?
> Is it more human to live as a slave…
Is it more human that productivity has increased 10x in the past decade but wages have been stagnant? Is it more human that we are increasingly forcing people to have bullshit jobs when automation could do it better and faster and we could instead re-distribute the wealth robots make into a UBI so that everyone could enjoy a life pursing their real passions?
> An ever-increasing percentage of world population lives in the best of times…
An ever-increasing amount of the world are living under a dystopian nightmare where people are being dehumanized and the planet being made unlivable all so arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger.
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The problem is not that we feel less human than we did before, but that we don’t feel more human now. With all of our progress and advancements, with our increasing understanding of ourselves and our world, why isn’t the world more human (more humanistic)?
This is not aimed at you; you just happened to be the comment that crystallize this thought I’ve been having for awhile.
I think this is one of the major problems with everything nowadays. Everything is so bloated and removed from its original purpose.
If we want a space for young adults to let loose and party before having to conform to adulthood, then let’s build that separate from education so my tuition isn’t paying for the frat parties that I don’t go to.
If we want diversity and inclusion, then let that be a separate nonprofit that works with schools so that my tuition isn’t paying for my college to have more administrators than professors.
Furthermore, college sports:
“SHAPIRO: The principles that underlay the NCAA's philosophy seem like reasonable principles. Students should be amateurs. They should be college students. They should not be paid millions of dollars. But so many of the stories you tell seem like distortions of those reasonable principles, like people are just divorced from reality or out to get a student for no good reason. Did you get a sense of what is actually going on (laughter) in people's heads in all of these stories that you retell?
NOCERA: I think I do have a pretty good sense of it. Amateurism, which is the core principle of the NCAA, may have started out as a good idea, but with so much money now flowing into college sports, it's become a sham. And it's become kind of an excuse not to pay the labor force who are brining in the billions of dollars that are enriching everybody else. The NCAA itself is a kind of bureaucratic, rules-oriented organization…” (https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848768/indentured-explores...)
“The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does.”
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581613)
Admittedly, I am bitter about my college experience and probably wouldn’t have such a harsh opinion if it had been better. Like the other comments here mentioned, I found a CS degree to be a sham and I learned more and better on my own than I ever did listening to professors all of whom were worse at teaching than YouTube (especially considering that high quality channels like 3Blue1Brown exist) and some of whom can’t actually speak or write English well. A CS degree didn’t help me get a job but starting a hardware club did which is where my gripe comes from. There was never funding for clubs (that actually get students doing things they would do at their future job) or for professors to do research projects that students (like me) get to help with and build job experience. But somehow the activities and recreations always got an expansion.
There truly is an unfathomable amount of things you can do wrong and you literally could spend your entire life trying something and still suck. It wasn’t until I understood the basics well enough that I could meaningful make progress towards getting better (at cooking but also coding) or even understand what getting better meant.
Trying to get better at something by just doing it a lot is like brute forcing RSA encryption: talent, intuition, or inspiration about how to get better acts as a quantum computer speed up.
Or to put it more plainly: practice only makes perfect if you know what perfect is.
From the web development perspective, the network is no longer the bottleneck; its CPU processing power. Doesn’t matter how fast your website comes if it’s shove full of trackers and ads that mobile CPU can’t handle.
Put another way, what’s the point of downloading a terabyte of data in seconds when it takes your computer minutes to process it into something useful? Also, where are we storing all this data that we can download at super fast speeds? Most computers cap out at around 8 GB of RAM (though this does seem to be trending upwards) and SSDs read/write speeds are measured in megabytes (with most capping out at single digit gigabytes) so with terabit we are potentially downloading more data than computers can physically store per second.
Reducing latency though would be the real game changer. When Starlink finishes building out it’s fleet, we could see worldwide latency drop to he point that video games would no longer need to have regional game servers because of lag! But then the problem becomes “how to do you manage all those players on one server”? Annnd we’re back to our CPU limitations.
“That whole Xerox PARC thing in the 1970s—the thing that supposedly gave us the Mac, etc.—was actually not about having a mouse and windows; the big core idea was that we'd build models of our world in software and adapt them as we explored. Doctors could simulate new treatments; children could simulate rocket ships. We'd all have highly visual pocket climate models we could explore and manipulate, or the doctors would all be programmers themselves and make better patient-management systems. The idea was for software to become the humble servant of every other discipline; no one anticipated that the tech industry would become a global god-king among the industries, expecting every other field to transform itself in tech's image.”
A different way of interpreting the article is not why we (computer programmers) haven’t made things better for other people and their industries but why we haven’t found better abstractions for computing itself so that they don’t need us to make the software they need.
We no longer have physical human elevator operators pushing buttons for us because we made an friendly abstraction over that anybody could use. So why does the job of a software developer even exist? Why can’t people productively and easily make their own software? It would likely be better: extremely customized to their own needs, highly tuned based on their own in-depth domain knowledge, and continuously updated since they don’t have to ask and wait for someone else to do it for them. Why do we still have human operators pushing buttons for people?
I would also like to add that the notion that “because hand writing is more involved so you remember it better” doesn’t work for me. Hand writing is actually distracting because I don’t do it enough for it to be fluid so I focus more on the hand writing than what I’m thinking of and end up losing my train of thought. Typing on the other hand I’ve been doing since I was a kid ever since I became interested in computers and because it’s so natural and fluid I have an easier time putting thoughts down on paper and going down my train of thought.
Like you said, I think a better takeaway from this study is that you don’t remember what you don’t think about or engage with. I’m perfectly capable of not thinking about what I write and subsequently forgetting it just as much as this study claims only happens whe you type stuff out.