💾 Archived View for stack.tilde.cafe › gemlog › 2022-11-12.curve.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:46:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Things start slow and hard amd expensive, and get easier, cheaper and faster. That is how it is. Was it always like this, or are we on a runaway train?
With tech the curve is clear. Think back to 1953, when IBM was surprised to get more than 5 orders for a new computer. Coincidentally, John McCarthy put together the first Lisp a few years after - the language which pioneered garbage collection, bytecode interpretation, first class functions and lambdas, to name a few concepts - the language which I use daily... Weird, huh.
Back when Lisp was invented, running a Marathon was a feat for professional athletes. Today, if you go to a Marathon in your city (!) you will likely find older folks, people with arms and legs missing, and likely people who've had heart attacks. It's just a race. There are people who fly around the world and run Marathons a few times a week. It's not just tech, it's the whole society.
For a few decades computing machinery cost millions of dollars and are sitting in research labs. A few more decades and they cost pennies and are in every imaginable device -- sometimes more than one in each. The machine I am using daily, a 10+ -year-old notebook has a couple of cores running at 3GHz, with likely hundreds of instructions in flight at any given clock. I can replace it for a couple of hundred bucks. The solid wood bench next to me goes for a few thousand dollars.
There is a golden middle of the adoption curve, the place where tech is inexpensive yet hackable. Earlier it's too expensive and not accessible. Later, it's cheap but sealed in epoxy (or whatever future lock-up medium), and no longer general purpose or documented, because capitalism. Look at printers - you are lucky if you can find a way to feed 'unauthorized' ink into it -- never mind trying to hack them. They are locked up tight, and do weird shit after connecting to your WiFi, not to mention printing invisible watermarks to identify you should you do something stupid. Same goes for almost everything today.
We still have general-purpose computing, but for how long? Secure computing initiatives, including secure boot systems (or tech to lock you out of your computer unless you use authorized software) are becoming reality. Hacker platforms, like Raspberry Pi, boot via undocumented GPU blobs. You can never trust such a device. But you really cannot trust any device - all modern Intel and AMD chips have secret execution modes and god knows what else. And the Android experiment succeeded - most of the population is happy with a phone that is controlled by other entities.
Looking at the Meta fiasco, I guess that someday VR will happen. Just not yet. It will probably be porn-driven like most modern tech. You know, we are always told that this or that technology will change the world - think of education, access, opportunity for the disenfrachised, leveling the playing field, whatnot. In the end it becomes a megaphone for the super-rich and a way to get porn.
But I promised myself to not write negative stuff. So cheer up, and enjoy the tech, and the remaining solid-wood benches.