Huh, strange. I remember when I was a little 9 year old boy typing in:
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Then I was slightly older and discovered that 'programs' are just text you use a 'compiler' on and not a special thing you made in Borland's Turbo C.
Then I was older and started using vim. Then older still and made HTML pages with this new thing called DHTML on Geocities. Then ActivePerl. Then a VPS. Then Wordpress. Then discovered Prolog, Eclipse for Java, Mex for C++ in Matlab, and git. Then some years later github. Then interned in SF and discovered CI/CD, Hadoop et al. and how servers look in a DC in SOMA. Then IntelliJ. Then a trading engine. And then GPT was announced. And TalkToTransformer showed the future. And then people were demoing these ugly To-Do lists it could make. And suddenly we're here today.
Every stage of software has been incredible. I don't have to `movq`. I don't have to `jstack`. If I want a TUI, the tools can construct one to my specifications in moments. It's sheer magic, man. It's a scary time (I've had a couple of what-if nightmares about Dario Amodei ruling the world with his LLMs) but it's also exciting. I think I am happiest today. We're going to do so many wonderful things for so many people now that this is so much cheaper.
Perhaps it's just the good fortune of being born at this time during this thing and riding that wave, but it feels like the world of computing has just been so full of amazing leaps forward during my life. I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.
But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
Crime rates going down and down. Purchasing power grows everywhere in the world (but we want much nicer things now, so don't feel it). Travel is more accessible that it ever was in humanity history. Information keeps getting more and more accessible.
And literacy rates are increasing. I don't know why you say it's not, just google "literacy rates trend".
Efficiency gains have primarily benefited the capital owners. Workers ability to buy essentials like housing and healthcare have not gotten worse, not better.
I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.
> We're retiring later and later, working more per week
That may be true. But, if somebody offered me a time machine to travel back in time and live at any point in history, would I take it? Hell no.
> purchasing power is going down
That is not a new thing.
> quality of goods is going down
Phones are better. Computers are better. Cars, planes, washing machines ...
> life expectancy is decreasing
On the whole, this is not the case.
> child mortality is increasing
Globally?
> illiteracy is increasing
Globally?
You seem to have a negative view of things. And sure, many things are not great. But the examples you gave are not it.
Ya some people don't know the difference between their country falling apart versus the world falling apart.
> their country
Not even, I was taking the US as an example because they're at the front of this "tech will deliver us" hypothesis
What does it matter the world gets better when your neighbors do worse?
If all but one of my neighbors were improving, why would I focus on the one that insists on repeatedly shooting itself in the dick?
The other people in the world who aren’t your neighbors are also people.
Not globally, just in the place we let these things run at full speed without regulations: the US
Excuse me, but can you please explain this whole concept of 'retirement'?
It is some point where you just shut down your brain and feed yourself to the fishes?
Not being an US person I'm struggling with this. How? Unless one loses congnitive capability due to organic brain damage how is this even possible?
If you work most jobs, whether cognitive or manual labor, after some point you can't do them anymore, due to physical and cognitive decline, medical issues, and the plain fact that you can do that shit as a hobby if you really like it, but you shouldn't need to go to some fucking office or greet people in your local Walmart in your late 60s and 70s just to survive.
We call this stopping of work at that point retirement.
How about that?
Retirement is the withdrawal from active working life, i.e. having a job. It is not a US concept.
Right, and a nice thing about software is that retirement doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you used to do.
I’m retired (I know, I’m very lucky), and I’ve done as much or more coding since retirement than I did in my job. But to be fair, AI has really changed how I’m going about things, and I’m not sure what the future is going to bring. I really worry about my adult children and their careers.
But that's the point, ain't it? If you voluntarily abandon doing things you are basically declaring "I'm dead, ignore that I'm still breathing".
The notion that one's economic output is equal to one's worth as a person seems pretty wrong-headed, when considering what the purpose of life is.
>when considering what the purpose of life is.
And what is that exactly?
At best we seem to be rather large containers to ensure that genes get replicated.
That's for us to decide as individuals.
How can something be both wrong and subjective?
no contest on the first part, but can you enlighten on what is the purpose of life?
What point are you trying to make?
Point being that at no point in your life are you bound to be defined by "job"-"retirement" state transition.
Shed it already.
When your job and commute is 70% of your awake time I can assure you are very well defined by your job
So you're telling me that if you won $1b tomorrow you wouldn't know what to do besides continuing your 9 to 5 until you die?
Only if your life is so insignificant and your interests and social circle so narrow that your paid gig determines the whole of it and is your sole purpose.
But if it ain't so, there is effectively no retirement?
Not having a job anymore is very different from not "doing things" at all.
It's the part where you stop being a wage slave and can enjoy some freedom, I know, such an alien concept
>I look back each time and I think "man, I was doing that thing when I could have been doing it so much better?". And I feel so hopeful for the future.
The future appears now to be: "Young kids wont have this sense of wonder, or control of the machine, anymore. And a whole lot less will now have a career in IT either".
Learning the lower layer felt like earning access to the next level of reality. You had to understand the constraints to make anything happen at all. Now it increasingly feels like you can just describe the intent and skip straight to the outcome.
And simultaneously we built this huge machine that gives us everything we need to survive on software we don't understand, ready to have it abducted by people who have never done a (positively) productive thing in their lives seemingly any moment now. Monkeys with computers.
This is the history of every empire.
It's also why every empire in history collapsed.
I thought for a moment you were serious, but the line about us doing wonderful things with tech gave it away as satire. Yeah no. Best we can do is technofascism and surveillance state. Glad you happy though!